Re: Mefato

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 7/9/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>> he has sent me a copy
>> of a "De Kolovrat" style mapping of the syllables to bytes 00 through to
>> FF; he seemed quite pleased with this   :)
>
>
> I wonder whether octal would be a more appropriate representation then
> hexadecimal,
The idea was to emulate in base 16 what De Kolovrat did in base 10, that
is we allot a syllabic value to _all_ values from 0 to 100-1 in whatever
base we are using. De Kolovrat assigned values from 00 to 99 (decimal), see:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0104a&L=conlang&T=0&F=&S=&P=51469

If we used octals, then octal 0 to 100-1, gives us 00 to 77 or, in
decimal 0..63, which is not enough values for the Mefato syllabary. If
on the other hand we used 000 to 777, we'd have in decimal 0..511 which
is far too many.

> since then the first one or two digits would uniquely
> identify the consonant and the last digit the vowel, whereas with hex,
> the first digit could be one of two consonants depending on whether
> the second digit is 0-7 or 8-F.
But exactly the same applies in decimal 00..99 if we just use the
classical vowels |a e i o u| because 5 is 10/2. Mefato curiously had 8
vowels, and 8 is 16/2    :)

If you examine De Kolovrat's system you will find that Anander
Hythloday's hex system is analogous to De Kolovrat's decimal system.

When I saw 'Philip Newton' as the writer of the mail, I thought I was
going to read some comment about the names 'Anander Hythloday' and
'Mefato'    ;)

--
Ray
==================================
ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]

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