Picnic table variants...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Just my $0.02's worth: on f1r, line 13, right in the middle of the line, 
there's clearly a picnic table with a "9" through it - well worth closer 
examination.

My guess is that this is probably one extremum of the looped picnic table 
type (EVA "Sh") type, and was probably done early in the encoding process, 
perhaps while the underlying code was still somewhat in flux - I don't 
recall seeing other instances within the text even half as clear as this.

Similarly, on line 15 (not far to the the left of the picnic'ed 9), there's 
a picnic'ed "tear-drop", of the kind that Strong mentioned.

Given that f1r alone would, from the above, seem to display at least three 
kinds of picnic tables (ie, the above two, as well as numerous instances of 
the unlooped picnic table character), I'm not sure that I'm particularly 
comfortable treating all the picnic tables as a single character (yet).

My intuition (ATM) is that the picnic tables (including the "cc" Beneventan 
character, which is effectively an uncrossed picnic table) may well all 
turn out to be special characters within the cipher alphabet coding for 
doubled letters. Removing these was a key part of most ciphers in the 
Tranchedino collection (which dated from 1450-1500, and so were likely to 
be fairly contemporary of this manuscript), so that the decipherer didn't 
have pairs to work backwards from - and I don't see why the VMS should be 
any different in this basic respect.

In a way, this pattern would fit in well with my idea of the code-designer 
wanting to hide much of the mnemonic in plain sight within the alphabet - 
if "cc" is the basic mnemonic for "doubled letter" (it is, after all, a 
doubled letter), then the whole family of picnic tables may well all be no 
more than variations on the same basic theme (ie, they'd all be types of 
doubled letter).

Then: what doubled letters would I expect to see? Taking a typical recipe 
page from the Gli Experimenti (page 627 in Pasolini's Vol.3), the doubled 
letter counts I noted are:-

	LL	29
	SS	9
	CC	7
	RR	6
	TT	6
	NN	3
	ZZ	2
	FF	1
	BB	1

However, many (if not most) of these instances could be converted to single 
letters without affecting the sense of the sentence - as you'd expect. But 
even so, it would seem to point (if the underlying language was the same as 
that of the Gli Experimenti) to LL being the most likely candidate for the 
simple picnic tables (EVA "ch"), and perhaps SS being the most likely 
candidate for EVA "cc".

Further: if one gallows character somehow coded for "de", then that same 
gallows when struck-through could perhaps code for "delle", which is 
extremely common in the Gli Experimenti. Just a thought. :-)

It might not then be a coincidence that EVA "f" when drawn upside-down 
looks (a little) like not unlike a slightly-embellished ligatured 
"de"...  but feel free to disagree (as wildly as you like). :-)

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