Re: VMs: Word Endings

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Nick,

Makes sense to me - so, for instance, "Galli Romanos oppugnaverunt hastis
clamoribusque" could be transliterated into "Galli Romany oppugnavy hasty
clamory", and it would be possible to re-translate that unambiguously. Then,
adding your twist, you could have something like "GallichRom any oppug navy hasty
clamory", again unambiguously.

I still don't think it's what's going on in Voynichese, because of the order
constraints within the medial chunks :-( but it opens some interesting
possibilities.

Best wishes,

Gordon

Nick Pelling wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> At 21:54 10/07/2003 -0500, GC wrote:
> >Because of recent comments to the nature of "the VMS has so few word
> >endings", I've posted three short studies of these in separate files.
> >There's a lot to consider on this topic, so I'll just touch on a few and see
> >if we can draw enough different perspectives to look into this a little
> >deeper.  Follow me to http://voynich.info/vgbt/xcrptn/first_last.pdf
>
> I'm extremely interested in GC's transcription of the variously
> accessorised EVA <ch> characters: one interesting idea I keep returning to
> which might just explain these is my <generic shorthand completion token>
> hypothesis (which is similar to what Gordon just mentioned, but a little
> more specific) - I'll try to explain... [*]
>
> It's clear from a closer examination of the glyphs (as GC has done so
> assiduously) that there are multiple subtly different variants of EVA
> <ch>... but why should this be? Certainly, the VMS' core alphabet has
> several pairs of hard-to-quickly-distinguish characters (such as o-a,
> ii-iii, r-s, perhaps even 2+ forms of y, and arguably some of the gallows),
> which is typical of the kind of Quattrocento cipher I'm familiar with. The
> obvious suggestion might therefore simply be that this set of ch-mutants
> (?) is a form of nomenclature, containing (say) 5 or 6 particular words
> which would be better hidden than spelled out in full repeatedly.
>
> I'm not so sure. I have another idea...
>
> Digression: in the same way that I don't think VMS glyphs are letters (but
> are typically half-pairs), I don't think VMS words are words (if you're
> going to the bother of hiding letters, why make the words easy to discern?)
> - which means that I think
> --> (a) full-spaces are being inserted relatively systematically (though
> half-spaces may be meaningful) into an otherwise continuous stream, and
> --> (b) that the real word boundaries are probably happening *inside*
> apparent words (which would tend to increase the apparent "vocabulary", as
> we observe).
>
> So, given that I think that the plaintext is concatenated into a stream,
> encoded and then artificially divided so as to obscure real word divisions,
> what can we infer?
>
> The key observation here might be that, looking specifically at GC's second
> table, EVA <ch> very rarely terminates a word - my inference (on the back
> of everything else I've just described) is that this is highly likely to
> indicate that EVA <ch> terminates real words... the author is going out of
> his way to ensure that <ch> almost never terminates an apparent word, but why?
>
> All in all, I strongly suspect that <ch> functions as a "generic shorthand
> completion token", which I render as "..." (an "ellipsis", Unicode 0x2026
> if you're a code-junkie) - also note that the *physical rhythm of writing
> EVA <ch> on a wax tablet* (try it with a biro) has the same lurching
> three-step physical rhythm of writing three dots. In fact, I think that
> <ch> is a kind of *joined up ellipsis*.
>
> Now, even though Shakespeare uses ellipses, the idea is actually much
> older. FYI, I quickly found one page (on St Bridget's Tractatus de summis
> pontificibus) which mentions a Sara Ekwall in Sweden (now how weird is
> that?) dating a manuscript with three dots to 1402:-
>          http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bridget-tractatus.html
>
> But in fact, you can (apparently) trace it right back to Old Norse:-
>          http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=ellipsis
>          The ellipsis is first noted in Old Norse starting in about 200 BC,
>          which is the first known written language to utilize the ellipsis.
>          Often in Old Norse, writers would omit infinitive phrases and
>          non-action verbs, which is the first known existence of such
>          verbal omissions in written language. Old Norse was
>          particularly well structured for this because the language was
>          contextually very strong; writers and speakers were able to
>          easily make it apparent what the subjects and objects were,
>          meaning the verb became less important in many cases.
>
> My hypothesis is therefore that EVA <ch> represents a <generic word
> completion token> (ie, "finish the current word off in a sensible way"), in
> almost exactly the same way that Gordon suggested for EVA <y> for Latin.
>
> However (and here's the twist, at long last), I believe that EVA <ch> gets
> accessorised when the encoder reviews the text and realises that what he's
> written was actually ambiguous - so, the extra marks (loops, tears, curls,
> dots, whatever) are for disambiguating the text stream *somehow*... they're
> decoding hints, to indicate that you may need to think more about what
> they're abbreviating.
>
> So, all in all, I infer from this that the overall process for encoding a
> page went like this:-
> (1) clearly re-write the original text as continuous shorthand/tachygraphy
> onto a wax tablet
> (2) review it for ambiguities - mark up any ambiguous word endings with
> tears, loops, etc
> (3) encode it, leaving many of the original letters in place but faking
> word boundaries
> (4) Pass the wax tablet to a scribe for copying onto vellum
>
> It's not 100% cryptography, it's not 100% shorthand, but it makes a lot of
> sense to me: does it make any sense to you?
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
>
> [*] note ironic ellipsis! :-)
>
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