VMs: Alphabetical order? Was: The VMS "alphabet" and some other issues...

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Larry Roux" <lroux@xxxxxxx>
> If you took any
> modern language and simply put the characters in alpha order you would
> find many duplicated letters (eht eimov asw dgoo) and most words would
> not end in the same characters (ie ..dy ..y ..edy) as they do in
> Voynich.
>
> The problem with all of this is that it fails decryption rules: being
> that you must know which sequence is decoded by which rule.  So there
> would have to be some indicator that the next sequence was textual vs
> numerical vs encrypted.

These are two of the big objections to the idea I am working on at the  
moment. But I am beginning to think there might be answers to them.


1. Divide a plaintext into lines
2. Sort the words of each line into alphabetical order
3. Sort the letters of each word into alphabetical order

E.g.

1. one thing led to another thing last night
2. another last led night one to thing thing
3. aehnort alst del ghint eno ot ghint ghint

The result has some of the statistical properties of the
Voynich text.

A. The frequency distribution of words and letters is the same
as in the natural language plaintext, but the distribution of
two-letter groups and two-word groups is significantly altered.

B. Words at the beginning of a ciphertext line tend to start with
letters at the beginning of the alphabet. Compare the high
frequency of Voynich "d" at the beginning of a line.

C. If a letter near the end of the alphabet has a tendency to
be word-initial in the plaintext (e.g. German "w"), it will
have a strong tendency to be the last word in a line. Compare the
high frequency of Voynich "m" at the end of a line.

D. The ciphertext versions of frequent words will tend to cluster
together in a line. That is, where a word such as "thing" occurs
twice in the plaintext line (as in the above example) the two
word sequence "ighnt ighnt" will occur, but "ighnt" may also occur
elsewhere in the line as an anagram of "night".

E. A one-letter word of ciphertext can only be an anagram of
a single word of plaintext ("i" can only be an anagram of "i")
and a two-letter word of ciphertext can only be an anagram of two
possible words of plaintext ("et" can only be an anagram of "et"
and "te"). This means that you cannot have a ciphertext line of
the pattern "... i ... i ... " or of the pattern "... et ... et ...
et ...". This principle largely holds good in the Voynich text:
there are only six exceptions in the corpus of Currier's language
B.

Obviously there are difficulties with the idea.

1. Voynichese words do not conform to a strict alphabetical ordering
of letters (there are quite a lot of words of the pattern "dshedy").

2. Voynichese words have a strong tendency to contain only one
instance of a given letter, unlike any obvious candidate language for
the plaintext.

3. The enciphering described is not unambiguously reversible (however
I think it would work as a private aide-memoire, or as a means of
establishing priority like Galileo's well known anagram announcing his
discovery of the phases of Venus).

Here is an extract from a well known English novel modified in the way
I have described:

adn as cddeeirt for efnortu adforrw i em my now aprt dehpsu amsw asw
adn adn bmoott by cdlou dopr eefl i egls elt my no efnot deit dinw
abel almost adn btu dfnou egno i i eglnor no egglrstu ot asw ehnw
aabdet adn by dehpt chmu my eflmsy morst eht hist eimt asw hiintw
a beefor cdeiiltvy got i i eilm aenr allms os ahtt eht ot adeklw asw
abotu accklo 'ccdejnortu eghit eeginnv i in ehors eht eht asw chhiw

Can anyone read it?

Philip Neal






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