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

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Nick:

Nick Pelling wrote:
> 
> I'm not quite so sure: the VMS has lots of frequent Tut-like predictable
> sub-sequences (qo, ol, or, ar, al, dy, chy, o + gallows & y + gallows,
> never mind dain/daiin/daiiin, etc). Sure, this is my whole pairification
> thing (so I would say that, wouldn't I) - but they're there whether you
> like it or not.

	See my note to Graham.

> However, it's the contrast between this strong low-level structuring and
> the weak mid-level (ie, word-level) structure which generally fails to get
> explained by VMS theories. IMO, the EKT hypothesis is strong at the
> low-level but breaks down at the mid-level - languages are inherently
> redundant and broadly self-similar, which gives rise to many of the
> statistical relationships evident in normal texts.

	Again, see my note to Graham.  If the mid-level (or
rather, the middle or
core of each word) is the actual plaintext word and the
affixes are Tut-like 
additions or nulls, a King Tut type cipher could make
sense.  However, the CV 
alternation of a King Tut cipher isn't consistent (I
don't think) with what we 
see in the VMs.  I'd have to look at a Currier or Curva
version and bring 
out the consonant-vowel distinction.  

	If I'm right that the prefixes/suffixes are nulls/King
Tut's, 
then the core would be so small and concentrated that
the underlying
language must be monosyllabic like Chinese, Vietnamese,
etc.  

	It might
make more sense if the prefixes/suffixes are
inflectional or derivational
morphemes, i.e., grammatical endings or
meaning-modifying additions like 
de-, super-, in-, sub-, post, pre-, on Latin roots.
What does that assumption 
do on the entropy patterns? 

> Could there be a transposition cipher involved in the VMS? It's certainly
> possible - having spent some time looking at them, my inference is that
> transposition ciphers were trendy as personal cipher systems in the
> Quattrocento (eg, Leonardo da Vinci used one occasionally in his notebooks,
> which rather weakens the idea that he used mirror-writing for encryption,
> IMHO): this is because transpositions (like bbrvtns) typically make most
> sense to the brain-wiring of the person who made them.

	Don't forget that people make transpositions
themselves.  "Bass-ackwards" is 
a morphological transposition (linguists say
metathesis, I think), while 
US south Louisianians say "aks" for "ask", which is a
phonemic transposition/metathesis.

> However, (transposition + King Tut) would seem to be a long-winded code: my
> guess is that two of the mechanisms involved are (shorthand + King Tut)...
> well, OK, (shorthand + pairification). Remember, the author has already
> flagged to us that he's conversant with shorthand systems, by appropriating
> both (what appears to be) a contemporary pre-Characterie single-stroke
> shorthand alphabet, and a handful of Tironian notae.  

	A thought:  could the "core" be a shorthand plaintext
word, and the additions 
null?

Dennis
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