Re: VMs: Ryland 228

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gordon,

At 09:09 16/05/2003 +0100, Gordon Rugg wrote:
> A closing thought is that I suspect the manuscript was copied from
> something like an "eight-up" rough draft. This would be something like a
> bifolio-sized page containing miniature sketches of about eight pages of
> illustrations, with the master text being supplied separately. This would
> make sense of some of the apparent copying errors - for instance, the
> plants with roots that look like nested cones might well have been
> intended to have ridged tapering tuberous roots like carrots. This method
> of planning is quite a bit faster than producing a full-sized draft of
> each page. It also fits with the use of unique "labels" as the first word
> of many pages - that makes sure that the right text goes with the right
> illustration. (Though there are doubtless many other explanations which
> make equally good sense!)

If the diagrams in the VMS were traced (not perfectly, but fairly closely) 
from a pre-existent source, and the (I believe encrypted) text fitted on to 
the page at the same time, this would give the copyist the latitude to copy 
text or picture first as desired.

Also: the unique first word on many pages is an artefact that doesn't seem 
to match any cipher or code system (real, imagined, or simulated) of the 
period I know of, Trithemian or otherwise: nor any pre-existing scribal 
practice - for example, it seems unrelated to catchwords. I'd say it's 
currently a mystery, unexplained by 95%+ of hoaxing, encoding, enciphering, 
and artificial language hypotheses.

FWIW, I suspect that Steve Ekwall may have a rough pointer to what's going 
on here, in that he believes each page (or perhaps folio, or perhaps 
bifolio) contains a unique key (Steve says that it's 8-characters-long, 
though I think it could well be 8-grouped-pairs-long), which functions as a 
local input parameter to the coding system: because of the separability of 
manuscripts into folios, this type of key would be most likely to be hidden 
in plain sight at the point of use. It seems likely to me that many of the 
stylised gallows keys function as different ways of hiding this string - 
ie, as different shaped "key containers" (such as "contained within long 
gallows", vertical, horizontal, character offset [by a number of dots], 
split into parts, etc).

Philip Neal also has some interesting ideas about pretty much exactly these 
kinds of strings being hidden in the first line of a page (particularly in 
the starred paragraph section), often between two slightly accentuated 
gallows characters.

Note that whatever function of the coding system such a key might serve to 
alter, it would appear to be independent of the many global low-level 
structural features of the writing system - like <dain daiin>, and EVA 
pairs like <dy>, <ol>, <or> etc - which appear to be invariant between 
pages. This perhaps points to the key driving a transposition cipher of 
some sort (again, similarly to Steve Ekwall's theory, but yet not 100% 
identically). Of course, such a system with neither obvious precedent nor 
obvious derivative would be extraordinary - still, you never know... :-o

All in all, there are still a few too many leaps of faith in this whole 
line of reasoning for me to be completely comfortable with it (and I'm not 
sure I'd classify as a penitent man [*])... so I guess I'll just have to 
keep on searching for planks to bridge the various gaps... :-)

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

[*] (...gratuitous Indiana Jones references...) 


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