Re: VMs: qo-words

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nick,

On Monday 10 Mar 2003 11:40 am, Nick Pelling wrote:
> You could alternately look at <q> (as I do) as an "attachable" character,
> ie a "shift"-character that changes the interpretation of the rest of the
> token.

Well, yes attachable or detachable :-), but I am most surprised a the 
correlation between the qo- and o- pairs. My guess is that q is a word on its 
own rather than a character, something like "and" (or similar). One doesn't 
see many "and"s standing on their own.

I also did a correlation between the o- and detached_o- words (I removed the o 
from o-words and estimated the correlation between them and their paired 
versions. The correlation coefficient is 0.198 (i.e. very low) unlike the qo- 
o- pairs. So based on that finding, I think that the effect has to do more 
with q than with o.

> I found the most interesting thing is that you the data would seem to
> suggest that the <qo> in <qoteedy> is, at heart, *non-glyphic* - that is,
> that rather than the <qo>-centric decomposition...

Yes, me too. 

> This might further point to the ligatured <qo> glyph as being basically
> steganographic, designed specifically to throw code-breakers' attention
> away from the <ot> pair following the <q>.

Or that q is just a null.

> One yet further inference might be that, as this would be a far more
> refined version of the "4"/"4o" alphabet-hiding mechanism used in various
> North Italian codes circa 1440-1455, it would almost certainly post-date
> them, while still having been devised by the same code-maker: all of which
> would date it to 1455 or later (my two current hypotheses are 1463 and
> 1465).

Although I like the idea, the only problem is that q appears *almost* 
exclusively as word-initial (5423 out of 5456 instances!) Why should the 
duplet be coding for a character at the begining of words and not elsewhere?

Thanks for the comments.
Cheers,

Gabriel

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