Re: VMs: Ryland 228

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Nick,

As usual, the evidence looks ambivalent.... There are some illustrations (e.g.
f3v and f96r) which contain elements apparently copied rather than traced,
because the shapes aren't an exact match (the flower heads, in this case); I
think there are also some which appear to have been traced, but my memory may
be wrong here - Stolfi's violets are the case that comes to mind. (There's also
the issue of whether they were traced, or reproduced via pricking outlines in a
master copy, following C16th tradition...)

The labels are also ambivalent or polyvalent. They're consistent with a hoax,
giving the appearance of a genuine text where each page starts with a genuine
name; with a code, in which each page starts with an encrypted version of a
genuine name; and with a document in a genuine unidentified language, where
each page starts with a natural language name.
It's fairly easy to generate hoaxed unique labels for pages and for items
within pages (e.g. star names); it's also easy for a hoaxer to include an
aide-memoire in a section plan, such as "include some labels from the 'stars'
section among the gibberish in the 'cosmo' section, to make it look as if
you're cross-referring".

As for the role of gallows characters, much can be said about this, and
probably will be (to misquote Charles II).... The recurrent problem with VMS
research is finding answerable questions whose answers clearly exclude some
possibilities, and move us nearer to a solution.

Best wishes,

Gordon

Nick Pelling wrote:

>
>
> 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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