Re: VMs: Word Endings

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nick

Playing the devil's advocate once more, there is a way in which the output could
be made to look more like Voynichese.

Suppose that we use the first character or two of the word to represent number,
case, etc, and "y" to represent "appropriate noun ending". So, "qo" might be the
marker for "nominative plural", and "y" for "put the appropriate ending here". So
far so good.

We now rearrange the remaining characters of the words so they're in alphabetical
order, and insert the occasional wordbreak or "ch" as described in previous
posts. This rearrangement is a serious mistake on the part of the coder, as
described below, but it produces something along the following lines:

"gallichrom any oppug navy hasty clamory" becomes
"qoagllchomr any goppu anvy ahsty aclmory"
give or take a bit for my anagrammatic skills.

Harking back to my previous post about shorthand, the VMS creator tries this out
while the original text is fresh in mind, and is able to decipher the anagrams
(subsitutinng the endings with "y" etc means that there is less to re-arrange in
each word). Encouraged by this success, he enciphers the whole manuscript this
way, believing it's a two way cipher...

FWIW, I still don't believe it, but it's plausible so far, though I'll need to
think about Gabriel's points about Zipf...

Best wishes,

Gordon


Nick Pelling wrote:

> Hi Gordon
>
> >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.
>
> FWIW, I imagine the processing sequence to be more like:-
>       Galli Romanis oppugnaverunt hastis clamoribusque
> --> galch romch opgnavch hasts clamrch&
> --> gal chrom cho pgnav chhast sclamr ch&
>
> The final cipher stage(s) then have as its/their job the obscuration of any
> remaining language-like sub-sequences, like <numbers>, <pairs of
> consonants>, and <vowel-consonant pairs>. I think that a pair cipher (which
> also encodes pairs of consonants as a single pair) would do a pretty good
> job of this.
>
> One interesting thing is that this is already starting to have a VMS-like
> feel to it: and it's already noticeably shorter, which would give any
> verbose cipher stage some of the leeway it would need.
>
> >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.
>
> Maybe, maybe not - though I guess my preference is to think of what we call
> "Voynichese" as a process / algorithm artefact (rather than a language per
> se) - hence my reaching out to find stages within the overall dataflow I
> can comprehend. :-)
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
>
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