Re: The Royal Cipher

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

I'm still a big fan of the idea of characters encoding person
and/or case and thus getting rid of endings and/or articles and
possibly pronouns.  I used to think about that as a good idea
for a written language when I was studying Russian.  Not only is
it compact, but it makes it far easier to write in a language
that you are not entirely adept at.  I've often thought about
the differences in Voynich A and Voynich B being a difference in
skill level of the writers.  I'm sure Jaques Guy (for one) could
support me in the following statements from his Chinese
studies.  A beginning student will use the word 'shi' (to be)
far more than an advanced student, while an advanced student
will use words like 'jiu' (less than expected) and 'cai' (more
than expected) whereas a beginning student will avoid those like
the plague if it even occurs to him to use them. I've heard
things like that referred to as 'flavor words' when I studied
German and they tried to teach me to use 'da'.  Also, things
like the 'soft sign' in Russian might be almost totally absent
in a student of the language that can't hear the effect it has
on a phoneme (like me).  I've seen it suggested that Voynich B
might be further refinement of the cipher, perhaps it's a
further refinement of the languge ability.  If you did a word
analyses of my Chinese when I went to Beijing vs. when I left it
might seem like two different (but related) languages on the
mathematical level.  Even in one's native tongue we see big
differences as we become more eloquent through education.  Has
anyone done any comparative analyses of the same language as
spoken by different levels of speakers?  I noticed one of the
mathematical analyses pointed out an anomaly in the works of
Lewis Carroll.  It was suggested that it was because it was
aimed at children, was there any follow up to that?
Regards,
Brian

Gabriel Landini wrote:
> 
> 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