Re: VMs: Newbie's two cents worth

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2/14/03 12:42:52 AM, Ronald Farneth <mallzone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I'll just throw this out there and let you old-timers eat me alive!

You can hardly be blamed for not having waded through 12 years of
exchanges on the subject.

>It sure looks to me like a lost language with root forms for verbs, 
>suffixes for persons and genders and prefixes for tenses.

There are two main lines of beliefs here:

1. It is a cipher (non-trivial, by which is meant "not a single-substitution
   cipher")

2. It is not a cipher, or it is a trivial cipher, and the text
   is in an unidentified language, possibly now extinct, or which
   has changed beyond recognition over the past 500 years or so.

As for myself, putting together the evidence for a Northern Italian
origin, and Jorge Stolfi's statistics, I believe that the
author was a merchant, a traveller or a medic from Northern Italy,
who had learnt a couple of obscure dialects during his travels,
and wrote his notes in a those dialects, in an alphabet he invented
for the purpose. If I wanted to write my notes in a code that no-one
was likely ever to crack, I could write them part in Tsureviu, part
in Tolomako. Have you ever heard of those languages? And if I wrote
in a made-up alphabet, who would be likely to crack the code? 
Especially 400 years later.



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