obelus > 19-11-2021, 09:42 AM
pfeaster > 19-11-2021, 03:00 PM
(18-11-2021, 09:39 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Encoding does not have to be deterministic.One case in point: lately I've been studying Pitman phonography (i.e., phonetic shorthand) and reading a number of older texts written in it, both by people who were very adept at using it, such as Isaac Pitman himself, and by people who were not. Phonography wasn't intended to be difficult to read -- quite the opposite -- but it offered multiple strategies for handling particular situations, and different writers favored different ones, while the habits of individual writers sometimes varied over time or by context (e.g., personal notes versus correspondence). Historically, new forms were added over time to make it possible to write common phoneme combinations more efficiently; for example, a single distinctively-shaped loop was introduced after a few years to represent /str/, which would previously have taken more strokes to write. Sometimes an innovation was introduced and then withdrawn (e.g., two rarely-contrastive vowels were assigned different marks only briefly in the mid-1840s). The formal differences among texts in Pitman phonography don't seem any less extreme than the formal differences among Voynich languages, scribes, quires, etc. But Pitman phonography is both meaningful and legible, and all the examples I have in mind are in English.
Anton > 19-11-2021, 06:33 PM