Re: what makes a con-script a Con-Script?

 --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> skrev:
> On Saturday, September 25, 2004, at 04:33 , Philippe
> Caquant wrote:
>
> >  --- Rodlox R <rodlox@...> skrev:
> >
> >> if you had five or fewer tablet (each the size of
> >> your palm), which had
> >> symbols etched in them...how would you know that
> it
> >> was a written
> >> language?...as opposed to random slashes in the
> >> rock...or something else?
> >>
> >> just wondering.
> >>
> > Probably by noticing that some symbols come back
> at
> > different places, especially if they are not very
> > simple ones (like a single stroke), and perhaps
> even
> > come back in a similar "context" ?
>
> Nope - it does not confirm that you have writing.
> Symbols are certainly
> repeated on the Phaistos Disk and certain groupings
> have been noted, i.e.
> some symbols do come back in a similar context. But
> as more than one
> person has plausibly shown, the disk might be a
> board for a game, and not
> writing at all.
OK, but the original question was about distinguishing
between something meaningful and something totally
natural or at random. A game is meaningful, even if
it's not "writing".

But the question is not so simple, as the magazine
"Science et Vie" (october 2004) tells us, about the
"Voynich Manuscript". Specialists have been working 4
centuries on it and they couldn't yet decide what it
might mean, and does it mean something at all (or is
it simply a forgery, a hoax).

There is a site about it: www.voynich.net


=====
Philippe Caquant


Ceterum censeo *vi* esse oblitterandum (Me).

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