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Re: Doubled words



Hi Philip,

I shall continue to take the approach that the words are not words,
and that 'qokeey' is some kind of fingerprint of a concrete word.

FWIW, my belief is that - for the most part - a word start frequently indicates either a change in encoding mechanism, or an actual word start in the plaintext, or just obfuscation (though I think the first two probably dominate the third).


So: EVA "ot-" could well be using one code mechanism, "qo-" another, etc.

Given that I also believe that we're looking at a verbose cipher (with many plaintext letters encoded as ciphertext pairs), this would also have the effect of reducing the average length of a ciphertext word, which would be desirable on the part of the encoder - nothing would betray a verbose cipher quicker than double-length words. :-)

Also: it may well be that this general tactic would have the effect of producing the curious word-length distribution as frequently observed. That distribution provides a fairly strong counter-argument to the "words are words" view alone.

Also: I think that the existence of doubled words of different lengths may also form a good counterargument to the hypothesis that the VMS is encoded using some kind of polyalphabetic cipher with a fixed length cycle.

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