Some first impressions

[Woody Brison <wwbrison@xxxxxxx>]

My first impression of the VMS, looking at the pictures on the
websites where I can't see the actual letters but just the 
general layout of the pages and a general impression of the 
writing, is that this might be a book composed by somebody who 
wants to set down some notes or ideas on some subject. Normally 
I would first guess it's about the plants in the illustrations, 
but those defying identification, if we don't want to think 
this was written by a Ford Prefect type of person, then I wonder 
if the illustrations are just doodles; the writer just drew 
plant shapes, strange plant inventions.  I have seen youngsters 
draw similar things by the hour -- strange animals, monsters, 
cars, aircraft, spaceships, motorcycles... decorating their 
class notes and things like that with things that look like 
real world items but don't exist, you can't find one.  If this 
is true of the VMS then there might not be any particular 
concentration of herbal terms in the text.

Could the writing be in some language which hasn't been 
considered yet -- have you people scanned the world's languages 
exhaustively?  And then there might be tricks added, such as 
writing Lao or some similarly obscure language, but in western 
style cursive, so that it doesn't look like any language on 
earth. 

If it's in a cypher, then it should be a simple cypher or else 
take an unreasonable amount of time to write.  I seem to remember 
that Leonardo da Vinci had a cypher that was hard to crack, but 
it was quick to make -- he just wrote in a mirror. Seemingly such 
cyphers are hard to crack because they employ a 'think outside 
the box' kind of trick.

I remember reading of some English government officer who did 
this, used a simple but obscure cipher, and wrote an extremely 
candid journal on everything the government was doing, he was a 
trusted official on the inside and got to see everything 
firsthand, I guess.  Then his journal was passed down among his 
heirs and wound up in some library, finally somebody found it 
like 300 years later, when the cypher had passed out of ken, 
so it offered quite a puzzle to decypher it and was only solved 
**when somebody recognized the cypher as being this fraternity's**. 
(The journal then yielded all kinds of insights for historians.) 
What an adventure!  I read this in Kahn's _Codebreakers_.  
Perhaps a review of what they tried while trying to solve the 
cypher might be insightful on the VMS problem?  But he doesn't 
go into a lot of detail; check his bibliography for leads.

In fact wish I had a cypher like that.  Reading about the VMS has 
reinforced that wish.  To be really great, the cypher would have 
to be available for anybody to encypher, with a different 
'password' it becomes a different code; but in today's modern 
world I suppose a computer assist is no big deal.  It would 
however in certain circumstances be wonderful to be able to 
write something in code, generated mentally with no appreciable 
slowdown in writing it.  Those circumstances would be exactly: 
when a computer + program is not available, ie. pre-1950, ie. 
the VMS was made under those conditions, this is a fact!

I once tried using ideograms for a cypher; just used whatever 
shape came to mind to write something down, like a box with 
two dots to represent 'looking in', a sun with rays to mean 
'warm', and stuff like that.  Then I filed it away; found it 
again several years later; and can't decypher a single symbol.


Oh, and I remember something from an iconics class many years 
ago: letters which are made beginning with a single vertical 
stroke, then adding things, like I, T, F, E, etc. were called 
by this professor "vexillaries".  It was theorized that written 
language alphabetic and ideographic symbols evolve toward the 
easier-to-make, and vexillaries fit that model, but it was just 
a theory.  

I did a small study or experiment on the subject, and showed 
that there is an effect like that (at least it got me an A in 
the class:)  I got about a dozen students to take this survey 
sort of thing, they were told that some letters were going to be 
added to English, and shown a set of about 15 squiggles, they 
were asked to pick which ones looked most pleasing, to rank them. 
Then they were asked to practice them all a bit, then pick a 
second time which ones they liked best.  In most cases the 
students changed their minds about what was good after actually 
trying to write them a few times, altho perversely they showed 
no preference for vexillaries either before OR after.  

Oh, there I went on a tangent again, sorry.  The point was, I 
was thinking that your 'gallows' were our 'vexillaries', is that 
right?  A search of the net for the word doesn't pull up any 
pages on iconics; just the Phillipine flag. Hell, I mean, heck, 
it doesn't even pull up the word iconics as the study of letter 
shapes.  This class was about 28 years ago, I guess the advent 
of Macs and Windows more or less took over the word 'icon'.

Has anybody tried just sitting down and making the same kind of 
writing that's seen on the VMS?  Sometimes the actual experience 
has things to teach that no amount of theorizing can do, as in 
that study I made...

However, one thing very significant at least to me has emerged 
from studying the output of this list for a few days: it would 
be terrific to have a private cypher in which to keep my journal 
like that Englishman whose name I don't remember.  The fact that 
I could wish for something like this shows that somebody else 
might have done it and the result was the VMS.  

To pursue this, I think maybe I would investigate some simple 
known cyphers, simpler than the Playfair for instance, and see 
what the statistics on letters and words look like under those 
codes.  I guess da Vinci's would show a normal distribution of 
letter frequencies, but exactly reversed sequence frequencies.
That at least I think is the direction I would take, were I 
going to pursue the VMS closely, which I'm not.

I offer these thoughts, at least they are low cost.

Wood