Re: Brute Force attack on VMS

["John Grove" <4groves@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: <mskala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <voynich@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 10:30 PM
Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
>... This criterion is the reason I'm not convinced by claims of
decipherments
> that require the manuscript to be written in some natural language with
> the vowels removed.  There the amount of information the decipherer must
> add (by putting the vowels back in) is much too big a fraction of the
> information content of the final product.
>
> Matthew Skala
> mskala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx              I'm recording the boycott industry!
> http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/
>

    While I agree that some claims of decipherment take too much leisure in
deciding how to 'replace' the vowel content in a consonant only text, I'm
not so sure you can toss the basic concept into the trash so easily.

    Some earlier claims have ignored word spacing, added several vowels when
the author needed them to make a word work, conveniently chose alternate
readings for a given letter (like r or s in EVA) to the one that could make
a word, etc.  However, if a language is written in its natural state without
vowels - and is enciphered with a simple substitution with the VMS odd
character set, one doesn't have to 'add' vowels per se - unless you're a
foreigner and want to pronounce the words with some degree of accuracy. Now,
I can't say for sure that this line of thinking will ever result in
anything, but I'm not ready to discard the possibility that a vowel-less
(really vowel-limited) writing system is part of the underlying structure.

    In Arabic 'jumhuuriyya' is written with only 'jmhuria' - some vowels are
present, but several are understood. The Arabic word for 'sentences' is
'jumal' written with only the three letters 'jml'. Recently, Jorge has
ventured into the Turkic realm of languages as well - Turkish itself used
the Arabic script, although unsuited for the language, for a number of
centuries. I don't know enough about these (Turkic) languages to say
absolutely that a consonant based writing system was used effectively to
make recording information easily understood by a learned reader, but it
seems to me that a few centuries of forced use of an Arabic script on a
non-Arabic language leans toward the probability that a set of linguistic
rules 'could' govern the use of this type of system on several other
language families.

    John Grove