VMs: RE: King Tut Word Game, or the EKT Hypothesis

["Graham Waddingham" <Graham.Waddingham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting idea, but no cigar I think. I can read messages written in
this code almost in real time, and this was on my very first attempt.
Also theres just too much predictability, y is always followed by e, b
is followed by u 50% of the time etc. This *could* be a basis, but I'd
say theres more encoding going on, or it would have been solved long
before now.

Graham.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis [mailto:tsalagi@xxxxxxxx] 
Sent: 9 July 2003 22:04
To: VOYNICH-L
Subject: VMs: King Tut Word Game, or the EKT Hypothesis


	Very early in the history of the list, Andras Kornai
suggested that a word game like Pig Latin in 
English could explain the low entropies of Voynich
text.  I became interested in the King Tut word game:

A - a                   I - i           R - rur
B - bub                 J - jug         S - sus
C - cut                 K - kam         T - tut
D - dud                 L - lul         U - u
E - e                   M - mum         V - vuv
F - fuf                 N - num         W - wuv
G - gug                 O - o           Y - yec
H - hush                P - pup         Z - zuz

Q (as is)
X (as is)

- from *The Cat's Elbow and other Secret Languages*,
collected by
  Alvin Schwartz and pictures by Margot Zemach, 1982; a children's book,
  although it also has good scholarly references.  King
Tut or
  Double Dutch, p. 45-47.

	Thus one substitutes a different CVC combination for
each consonant.  The subsituents could be short words. 
Also, there could be more than one substituent for each consonant; the
operator's personal choice of substituents could explain the difference
between Voynich A and B.  

	However, if one applied such a system directly to
words, one would get long words, much longer than one
sees in the VMs.  It could be that the underlying
source is divided up into syllables.  This would allow
the underlying language to be a common European one.  

	I've elaborated this idea in more detail as the EKT
Hypothesis:
http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/ekt.txt

	In addition, if we assume that the underlying text is
divided into syllables, that would make French a good
candidate for the underlying language, since the spoken
form of French, since medieval times, does not contain
such word markers as syllabic stress, etc., and most
morphemes are bound.  

	What are the arguments against the hypothesis I've
just set out?

1)  *Word Structure and Word Internal Structure of
Voynichese*  I've attached a relevant post by Philip
Neal. I think his points are still valid even with the
King Tut cipher.  

2)  *Number of Voynichese Words*  Gabriel Landini told
me that Voynichese has 8200 words (dictionary entries). Consider French
once again.  The great 19th French crippie Etienne Bazeries broke Louis
XIV's Royal Cipher and found that it operated on syllables.  The
ciphertext consisted of 3-digit number groups.  Since some of the groups
stood for words or homophonic equivalents, let us say that French
contains 500 syllables for simplicity.  If each consonant had 3 King Tut
substituents, for each CVC syllable we would have 9 possibilities, for
each CV syllable 3 possibilities, and for each VC (word-initial)
syllable we would have 3 possibilities.  Thus we might have, say, 6 *
500 = 3000 enciphered 'words', which is at least in the right
neighborhood.

3)  *Consonant-Vowel Alternation of Voynichese Words* 
If the hypothesis is correct in its simple form, we
should see mostly CVCV , CVCVCVC , and VCVC Voynichese
words, while I do not believe we see this sort of consonant-vowel
alternation.  Of course, consonant clusters could stand for a single
consonant phoneme, as
German sch / English sh / Hungarian s   all stand for
the same phoneme.  

	Comments are invited.

Dennis
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list