Re: Nabatean, was Re: VMs: Personal Guess

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff wrote:

> copying. If it is not a cipher at all but a lost or very rare language none
> of the attacks made against it will work.

The possibility of the VMS being in some extremely obscure natural language has
been raised periodically on this list. It has always seemed really unlikely to
me, however, that one excellent example of such a language would turn up one
place in the world and and not a scrap anywhere else. (The members of this list
have continued to search for examples of the VMS script for years, with a
completely negative result.)

(Is anyone aware of another natural language which been found in only one
example?)

Though it is always possible that the VMS represents a natural language encoded
in some way (say, a transcription of a non-written language or a shorthand), the
idea that it is plaintext in a language that we can't read only because it is so
obscure seems pretty unsupportable to me.

Bruce Grant

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