Ambiguous Spaces

[nablator]

You of all people should know this.
Do I now write "le xxx" or "l'xxx"?
Sometimes you have to listen to your instincts.

An "honest" transliteration should be about what is, not what you want it to be.

'Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.' -Mark Twain

In the 15th century they didn't have have a choice between le and l' ; when xxx started with a vowel the apostrophe was not written. It is true that spaces were often omitted in manuscripts: when you know the language, it's easy to locate missing spaces, just as in spoken language.

Right. What I'm getting at is that, taken over the whole manuscript, the amount of text is so large that things tend to cancel each other out to a surprising degree. You might notice that some of the stats you are looking at don't change all that much between a transliteration with and one without uncertain spaces.

I remember posting some graphs on the MATTR thread, then removing them as they are so much dependent on uncertain spaces... some statistics are more affected than others.

If I'm not mistaken in case of random errors or mischief in spacing the highest frequency vords should not be too much affected, (remove say 10% of all spaces and they remain the most frequent, down to a certain level of frequency) and since the frequency of vords correlates very well with "regularity", Massimiliano Zattera's claim that vords were built by some process enforcing his 12-slot alphabet/sequence, with some spaces omitted, is even more likely to be mostly correct (I don't think he mentioned the frequency-regularity correlation). Is daiin actually d aiin? Maybe, but neither the slot sequence nor the grammar tell us.

He put the final nail in the coffin of natural language substitution cipher theories (even those that include some amount of processing, like removing vowels or duplicate parts), but who noticed? Not the natural language theorists.