08-05-2026, 12:26 PM
Quote:@ Stolfi
On the other hand, I believe that ee is a single letter in the same class as Ch and Sh. And also that the gallows k, t, CTh, CKh, and the "benches" Ch, Sh, ee can take a postfix e modifier. That is, Ch and Che are two distinct letters. These spelling rules would add 7 letters to the "alphabet".
And maybe the "circles" a, o, y function as modifiers of other letters, too.
Yes i agree ee could be a single letter, there are quite other bigrams that could be one Letter/ one stucture. If you define bigrams other than letters, you end up with 30–40 possible letters, depending on. The problem with the bank gallows and the postfix, yes i think that's possible too - a, o maybe.., y is an extremely unusual glyph, with a tight connection to the space character and qo, and a few other peculiarities...
We all know the peculiarities of y. In my opinion, it is with relative certainty not an ordinary letter, but a position-dependent functional glyph. And the proportion of space transitions involving y is a strong indication that the spaces in VMS are not neutral word boundaries, but possibly active cipher elements. On the other hand, yqo (without a space) could also be a trigram (rule: ALWAYS separate yqo with a space after y so that an uninitiated reader might think it's Latin...which actually worked
), a trigram that perhaps stands for a letter or a syllable.But these are all factors that don't exactly make solving the VMS any easier...