Re: The Royal Cipher

["Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5 Jul 2000, at 22:47, Dennis wrote:

>  Both Singh and Kahn note that Louis XIV's Royal Cipher 
> (probably more correctly nomenclator) enciphers *syllables*, 
> rather than single letters (phonemes, etc.).  

>  I was really glad to see this, because it fits 
> perfectly with my theory of the VMs: that the underlying
> language is medieval French and it enciphers syllables
> rather than phonemes. 

Wouldn't enciphering syllables require a very large number of 
symbols?
About 98 % of the vms can be encoded with eva  'a-z

It would make words much shorter and keep Zipf's law unchanged, 
though.

Of course, one does not need to encode *all* syllables...

Gabriel