From: Sven Geier (sgeier@astro.umd.edu)
Date: 14-Apr-95 (0:43:24 GMT)
Subj: idle speculation

Since message 9 didn't exactly provide a wealth of new information to speculate upon
(which I think to be the reason for this nonexisting debate), I reviewed
some older stuff and came up with a new idea for "-":

Somebody mentioned much earlier, that we'll run out of new symbols at some
point, and that there'd have to be a mechanism to expand the character set in some way.

Now what if the Cetians have been clever enough to anticipate this dilemma - but
instead of just starting over at "0" (with some additional qualifier),
they started expanding the list of symbols "sideways". What I mean is, that they
use "-" to indicate that there's something new here (e.g. "-3-" is a new
thing for which we have no new symbol, thus we just recycled the "3" and put a pair of "-"
around it). They may do this, to indicate something like relation between concepts,
without really knitting close ties between "3" and "-3-".

Thus "-2-" could be read as "that word, which was derived from "2" "
and thus "-2-" could be practically anything, that is related to the
concept of "home", "birthplace", "shelter" etc.

In this sense, "2 -2- 0 -2- 2" could be anything from "cetians live on homeworld"
to "Cetians watch infomercials on homeworld" or even "cetians
have families on homeworld" ("cetians hate homeworld"??).

Just some ideas here ...


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