[Talk] Upcoming VMS lecture in NYC

[Torsten]

I didn't say it WAS a phonetic transcription, just that it MIGHT be.

In alphabetic scripts a grapheme often corresponds to a phoneme. Normally there is no grapheme for every phoneme since not every phoneme transports meaning and also grapheme combinations can be used to represent certain phonemes. See for instance the digraph <th> in english. 

Therefore, additional letters or markers are necessary for phonetic transcriptions. They are necessary since phonetic transcriptions transport more information. One puzzling feature of the VMs is that the entropy value is consistently lower than that of any known natural language. Therefore the evidence clearly speaks against the hypothesis that "the symbols represent a loud rather than a written letter".