Re: VMs: Nick's curl above Eva-ch

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rafal,

At 13:57 13/07/2003 +0200, Rafal Prinke wrote:
> > I completely agree - how could a language be constructed where the
> > vocabulary is so malleable that several pairs of letters appear to function
> > in some kind of interchangeable way?
>
> But note that at the time period concerned spellings of
> gentile languages were quite flexible, so that for example
> "c" and "k" were often used interchageably, the same with
> "i", "j", "y" or "u", "v", "w", "vv", "uu", or "s", "z" and so on.
> More examples could be made for clusters ("ch", "cz"), and then
> there are different glyphs like "s" and "long-s" or ligatures
> like "double-s", "tz", "fi", etc.

Of course, there's no question about that. Here, I'm specifically more 
interested in the matrix-like symmetry of many common VMS pairs - such as 
[o-/y-/qo-] + [gallows], as well as [o/a] + [l/r/s] - which would seem to 
have more in common with what we might now think of as universal / 
artificial / constructed languages than with a real-world language.

Predictably, I see this as a (OK, admittedly fairly minor) flaw in the 
design of the pair cipher: our (posited) code-maker had probably never been 
exposed to such artificial languages, otherwise he might have taken (even) 
more pains to make his interior language more naturalistic - hopefully 
it'll prove lucky for us that he didn't. :-)

However, this is what I believe to have been behind many modern observers' 
view of the VMS as an artificial language: simultaneously, modern 
cryptanalysts are simply not (conceptually) used to seeing through pair 
ciphers' interior languages.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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