RE: VMs: News and Replies

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi GC,

At 21:22 27/01/03 -0600, GC wrote:
> While I agree in principle that many of the characters are
> extracted from some remnant of Tyronian Notes, I disagree on the
> "4o" form being out of synch with the rest of the cipherbet.  I
> have always viewed it as an artistic form akin to the gallows
> characters, which start with the "4" stroke and also have an "o"
> loop.  Indeed, there are a few "squat" gallows that resemble the
> "4o".

Here, I'm pointing specifically to the constructional difference in 
stroke-style. Whereas the rest look like they have been adapted directly 
from a fluid, single-stroke shorthand alphabet, developed for use on wax 
tablets, the angular "4" glyph seems a different kind of beast - that seems 
like a glyph designed for use on paper or parchment. This is the particular 
difference I'm flagging here.

If, exactly as in the other cipherbets where they appear as a pair of 
codes, "4" and "4o" code for separate tokens, why should the more common 
(by a large degree) be the longer of the two?

To me, whatever genesis of the cipherbet you infer would need to explain 
this and similar phenomena: my inference is that the cipherbet was designed 
to look like a simple contemporary cipher, and to do that you'd need to 
keep the number of apparent letters to about 23-25.

Adapting an existing shorthand alphabet provided the first pass, and this 
may even have been used in some correspondence (now lost). However, I 
believe that when the same basic cipherbet was applied to the particular 
content of the VMS, an additional rare letter was found (which I think may 
well have been "z") and the "4" glyph added to code for it, perhaps by a 
second code-maker.

Then, a further token needed to be added to the code which hadn't 
previously proved necessary - as I believe that the VMS' code is based 
around an embellished Florentine number code, and that the original (base) 
cipher was (like 99% of contemporary) for correspondence I strongly suspect 
that this extra token meant "number following", otherwise a number would be 
an index into a codebook.

My inference here is that, rather than add an extra glyph, the second 
code-maker used a pair of existing glyphs in a way that he's used before 
(or had seen before). This way, the number of apparent letters stays 
relatively small. However, what he didn't realise at that time was that 
uses of "4o" would end up outnumbering uses of "4" by about 35 to 1.

This also points to the underlying alphabet containing more than 24 
characters - perhaps 35 or even 40, it's hard for me to say ATM - often 
encoded as pairs of characters ("as", "os", "on", "oe", "of", etc).

You may say that this is building on sand, and to a degree I'd have to 
agree - but the cipherbet glyph shapes are just about the only thing we 
have that can be referred directly to a well-documented existing tradition 
in a reasonably meaningful way (nymph hairstyles apart). :-)

> Apart from this observation, I haven't really ran any tests
> to see whether the "4o" combination acts like a gallows or not, so
> this is simply a subjective observation on the "artistry" of the
> manuscript.

"4o" is often followed by gallows, whereas gallows are rarely followed by 
other gallows etc: this has been discussed on-list many times before, I 
believe.

> I still haven't found the source, but I seem to
> remember that the "4o" was indeed astrologically based, or at
> least could quite possibly be.  Have you looked into this?

Yes - but despite looking for some time for links between the cipherbet and 
astrological glyph-sets, I haven't found anything really substantial. ATM, 
my best call is that the "4o" glyph (yes, it's a single glyph) probably 
originates from those mid-Quattrocento Italian cipherbets rather than from 
anywhere else.

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

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