References - Part 06

References:

http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/

Part 7 – Looking for Patterns II

Boshevski and Tentov also identified six symmetrically inclined syllabic symbols of the consonant-vowel type see section 1.1.3 “Inclined Syllabic Signs” and four specific syllabic signs see section 1.1.4. “Specific Syllabic Signs” at http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/

To take care of isolated cases of consonants or vowels, Boshevski and Tentov discovered that by using a slanted sign like an apostrophe or a horizontal dash in conjunction with a consonant, the vowel is eliminated from the consonant. Additionally they found a number of symbols that were representative of isolated vowels see sections 1.2 and 1.3 at http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/. This means that words like “how” with consonant-vowel-vowel or words like “word” vowel-vowel-consonant-consonant can easily be accommodated by this alphabet.

I must mention at this point that what has been discovered up to now was not obvious or straight forward. The process of identifying the isolated consonants and vowels was very much iterative and complex.

After isolating and identifying the various uniquely occurring symbols, Boshevski and Tentov began to look for reoccurring patterns of symbol groupings. A repeating pattern of a group of symbols in the same order throughout the text is indicative of; (a) connecting words such as “at”, “and”, etc. (b) names of important individuals such as rulers, gods, etc. and (c) various other words that happened to be repeated in the message.

After careful examination a number of reoccurring patterns began to emerge, among them were pictographic signs which did not fit in the syllabic concept. The most prominent of these were the sign consisting of three vertical dashes “|||” and the sign consisting of three slanted dashes “///”. Besides these, two more less frequently occurring signs were also discovered and documented see 1.4 “Pictographic Signs” at http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/.

Among the various representative symbols Boshevski and Tentov also found symbols with other symbols occurring on top of one another. In other words, two or three symbols occurring together one on top of the others. These Boshevski and Tentov deemed to be ligatures which, as mentioned earlier, are characters that combine or tie multiple letters together. As a rule, the beginning of the word was written with a ligature, whereas the end of the word, whose beginning was written with a ligature, was realized with one and very rarely with two or three syllables. In other words, these were very short words.

All in all up to the date of posting their results on http://rosetta-stone.etf.ukim.edu.mk/, Boshevski and Tentov identified 25 unique consonants and eight vowels. Twelve consonants are of the asymmetrical type where each can generate up to eight syllables, the remainder are of the symmetrical and slanting types that can each generate up to four syllables. A fifth syllable can also be generated by using isolated consonants in conjunction with slanted signs as mentioned above. Seven of the eight pure vowel types have also been identified and catalogued. Thus the combined number of consonant-vowel, isolated consonants and isolated vowels have a potential of creating over 180 syllables which when combined have a potential of generating virtually an infinite number of words.

The big question here is; what sound does each syllable make?