My thoughts on the VMS

[Emma May Smith]

I think the number of <e> characters is significant, so much so that I immediately rejected the Takahashi transcription and created my own, partly because he neglected to include some of the <e> glyphs, almost as if he were reluctant to accept that there could be three or sometimes four in a row. That kind of editing, based on preconceived notions of natural language, can affect the results.

I think it's entirely possible that <ee> (which I call <cc> because I don't like imposing meaning on the shape of the glyphs) could be a digraph and may function separately or differently from a single <e>.

I've wondered if [e] and [i] sequences are almost a kind of code. So that rather than [ee] being a combination of digraph of two [e], it signifies one of a class of items. So their values are linked in some way, but rather than one being somehow double the other, the doubling only really shows which of the class of values is meant.

For example, in Welsh orthography a single 'f' denotes the sound /v/ while 'ff' is the sound /f/. Obviously /f, v/ are linked sounds, and the doubling up of the character seems to signify 'the other f' rather than something inherent to the sound. Whereas in English orthography 'ee' and 'oo' are attempts to show length by doubling.

The question is--at least for linguistic research--is how educated medieval people understood sounds and how they classified them.