Re: 2 Things: One Interesting, One Not

On Mon, 25 Feb 2002 16:32:49 -0600
Peter Clark <pc451@...> wrote:

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> On Monday 25 February 2002 03:03 pm, Bryan Maloney wrote:
> > >Matthew Kehrt <matrix14@...> wrote:
> > >another hoax or what?
> >
> > There are a lot of theories on that manuscript.  Some I've seen on
> > this mailing list were (unless I saw them elsewhere):
> >
> > It's a degenerate/redundant cypher.
> > It's an attempt at writing Chinese alphabetically.
> > It's total balderdash.
> > It's a degenerate cypher mixed with total balderdash.
>         You forgot to mention the one that I like, for obvious reasons: it's an
> early example of a conlang! Of course, there's no more proof of this than for
> any other theory, but I believe that it has been established that the
> language is not Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, or any other Euro-lang. It
> might be the case that it is one of the above languages encoded.

Hmm... I wonder what the following method would make of it -
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=975770

It strikes me too that the software described here might be of
interest to conlanger anyway - a "language relation" measurer.
Of course the core technology, the zipping algorithm, is publicy known
so I guess the whole system could be reimplemented if the authors
didn't make it available.

stephen

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