Re: VMs: qo-words

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gabriel,

At 17:16 10/03/03 +0000, Gabriel Landini wrote:
> Or that q is just a null.

Though this is always a possibility, it may be worth examining the contexts 
before both <qo>- words and <o>- words to see if they're correlated at all. 
It certainly would seem to be fair game for stats. :-)

> > 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?

This is kind of why I thought <q> might indicate a "shift" token: its 
effect would then be local to the token it was attached to (which I'm 
guessing may be an interestingly-structured number format). The <q> token 
would then make little sense elsewhere in the text.

If the overall text was number-heavy (ie, had lots of code indices or 
numbers), that would explain much of the structural behaviour we've noticed 
over the years, so that presses my buttons. :-)

Finally: using "4" as a shift-token would also be interesting because the 
"4o" would be a kind of ironic steganography - someone who had seen the 
earlier "4"/"4o" codes might be misdirected into thinking "4o" was a single 
glyph. But perhaps I'm reading too much into my forensic cipherbet analysis 
here. :-)

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

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