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Re: Transition between languages A and B

Hi Rene,

No, this is about the stars or 'recipes' section,
ff. 102 - 113 or thereabouts (this is from memory).
First I thought there are two dialects, but one
main difference between about half the pages and
the other half is the occurrence of the 'word'
qokeey which is either very frequent or non-existent.
Again, on f.58 (which has also got stars in the
margin) on one side the word appears 6 times and
on the other not at all.

It's just got to mean something :-)

To my eyes, the three stars on f58r (the first with six points, the second with seven points, and the third with eight points) are even more suspicious. :-)

Two of them having a circle in the middle... perhaps this too might be connected with Steve Ekwall's dot-in-the-middle-of-a-star-meaning-a-male-birth idea in some way?

My guess is that the stars at the side of the recipe section paragraphs correspond to a simple visual indexing system, where the colour, number of points, and dottedness (etc) serve to categorise it into one of several groups of recipes (cosmetics, alchemy, pharmacy, etc).

If it is a heterogenous recipe list much like the Gli Experimenti or Isabella Cortese's Secreti, I'd further guess that it was accumulated by hand over many years, so - like Tranchedino's cipher collection - the recipes (if kept in the correct order) would still be in order of acquisition, which the owner of the collection would be well acquainted with.

Then, the problem for that person would be a matter of finding the correct recipe within the approximate page - which is what the stars would assist with. This would then point to the code being accessible but not trivially readable.

Note: I think "dain"/"daiin" (as a number of ounces) would be a special case, because any errors in encoding those would have the effect of destroying the worth of the document - far too important to scramble, far better to use stego for those than crypto.

I also strongly suspect that the encoding system has a local code-book on each page (my suspicion falls on the first 8-10 characters and/or characters below/near split gallows), which would sharply reduce the likelihood of finding matching "words" between pages, as well as most global statistical measures.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....