Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So for the type work I do, I pretty much ignore most tags. I'm only concerned with the text and it's data.  So, for your transcription I did the following:

"." - solid word break
"," - possible word break
"-" - major text break

For all of those, I converted them to spaces.

Seems reasonable.  The "-" is usually a figure intruding into the text line.  Line breaks in the text are line breaks in the file.

However, treating "," as a space, like ".", may not be correct.  (That is why we use "," instead of ".")  Unfortunately spaces are often uncertain, and each transcriber may choose to ignore them or transcribe them with "," or ".", inevitably influenced by his intuition of what is a valid token.   Thus a text that was supposed to be "ched.araiin" may be transcribed as "chedar.aiin" or "cheda,raiin" or etc etc.

Thus any analysis that depends on word breaks will have some amount of "noise". In your case, strings that your program considers to be suffixes could be middle parts of the intended word.

? - splats.  I strip any word that contains even 1 splat.

It is a sensibe decision.  The "?" may be an unreadable glyph, but may also be a "weirdo" glyph that occurs only a few times,and thus probably a Scribal error.

You also use b, j, u and v.  I included them.

I used them in my transcription because the goal was to record the text as accurately as possible within the constraints of EVA . However, in my analyses I consider "g" = "m", and "u" = "n". I would also say that "j" = "d" and "eeb" = "iin", "eb" = "in", "b"= "n".

I also consider the following to be errors by the Author, the Scribe, or the Transcribers:

    text = re.sub(r"ir", "iin", text)
    text = re.sub(r"is", "iin", text)
    text = re.sub(r"m",  "iin", text)
    text = re.sub(r"hh", "he", text)
    text = re.sub(r"ih", "ch", text)
    text = re.sub(r"i([ktpf])h", r"c\1h", text)

 I noticed something unusual in your transcription, the C row. ... So the main result is in your transcription, standalone c is overwhelmingly tied to gallows constructions, especially c + gallows + h.

I did not follow the details of this comment, but yes:  in my word model, there is no standalone c or C.  There are only Ch, CTh, CKh, CPh, CFh. Thus when I see something that looks like a c outside of these cases, I assume that it is a distorted e and transcribe it as "e".  There are rare cases of CHh, CTHh, CKHh, CPHh, CFHh; I transcribe them as such, but I think those are actually Che, CThe, CKhe, CPhe, CFhe .

All the best, --stolfi