12-04-2021, 01:49 PM
Koen, this is a fair question and comment, but I will reply with a fair comment of my own:
I am sure you regard my various methods as having "interpretative steps" that you would consider "one-way ciphers" with too much freedom.
The problem is that most actual writing systems would also properly be considered one-way ciphers with too much freedom, which require interpretive steps on the part of the reader in order to understand them properly. For example, would you like to express this paragraph that I am writing right now with a set of rules to convert it into even a rough approximation of its phonetic form?
Or how about the paragraph from the West Vlaams Wikipedia page that I posted in the Germanic thread -- would you be able to state an explicit, repeatable method that expresses written West Vlaams as a set of rules to convert a paragraph of it into something that makes sense in standard Dutch, or better yet, in a different language?
In my view, the process of reading and understanding written language, any written language, requires "interpretative steps" on the part of the reader, and what goes on in the reader's brain in order to make sense of the meaning of the written language cannot be boiled down into any explicit, repeatable set of rules. In short, actual writing systems of actual natural languages are indeed one-way ciphers, with a large degree of freedom.
I am sure you regard my various methods as having "interpretative steps" that you would consider "one-way ciphers" with too much freedom.
The problem is that most actual writing systems would also properly be considered one-way ciphers with too much freedom, which require interpretive steps on the part of the reader in order to understand them properly. For example, would you like to express this paragraph that I am writing right now with a set of rules to convert it into even a rough approximation of its phonetic form?
Or how about the paragraph from the West Vlaams Wikipedia page that I posted in the Germanic thread -- would you be able to state an explicit, repeatable method that expresses written West Vlaams as a set of rules to convert a paragraph of it into something that makes sense in standard Dutch, or better yet, in a different language?
In my view, the process of reading and understanding written language, any written language, requires "interpretative steps" on the part of the reader, and what goes on in the reader's brain in order to make sense of the meaning of the written language cannot be boiled down into any explicit, repeatable set of rules. In short, actual writing systems of actual natural languages are indeed one-way ciphers, with a large degree of freedom.