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RE: VMs: New guy on the block
Hi Dan,
At 09:20 04/04/03 +0200, Dan Gibson wrote:
Incredible. Thanks. I logged onto the
http://www.flamingjesus.com/voynich/ site and started downloading. Wow.
This is great. CopyFlo from Beinecke Rare Books would have been great,
but since I am not currently located in North America, this site is
wonderful. Does anyone know if these scans are copyrighted? Like, if I
produce a web page with my (hopefully) translations, will I be breaking
someone's copyright laws?
The scans seem to be, errrm, *close to the edge of legality* (note I'm not
saying which side of the edge). If you're using them for academic or
research purposes, you're probably just about OK... but it's hard to tell
for sure.
I guess that's a ways away. I'll be busy trying to decipher this thing
for a few hours. :)
That's what we all said when we started... :-o
I guess non of you is expecting a big breakthrough
between now and then are you?
It's always possible but... :-)
And thanks for the help with the EVA font. Yes, there are lots more
characters here. Now to try and get them down to something less than 30,
hopefully around 22. I already have formed some strong opinions about
this text, but there are some problems with my theory.
The biggest problem you'll find is that the characters are heavily
structured at a very low level (there are lots of adjacency rules and
frequent patterns), which would seem to rule out polyalphabetic ciphers
(unless you introduce a lot of mental gymnastics to account for those
structures) - and it doesn't appear to be a monoalphabetic cipher either,
nor a number code (unless heavily embellished).
Cryptologically, there's a strong case to be made that pairs (or groups) of
glyphs might code for letters or letter pairs - examples (like "or" "ol"
"os" "ar" "dy" "ee" etc) spring readily to mind. These kind of things were
already in use in a few recorded ciphers from about 1440-1450, so wouldn't
conflict with any historical (art historical) data suggested by the VMS'
diagrams.
BTW: my current favourite non-crypto candidate is an Italianised version of
"siyaqat", which was an Ottoman court shorthand from the 16th Century
(possibly slightly earlier) - there's a book on it (by Lajos Fekete), but I
haven't yet had a chance to drop by the British Library to check it out...
any day now. :-)
Note that the suggestion that there are copying errors in the VMS is an
interesting assertion, but one which is hard to validate.
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
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