Re: VMs: 1st Impressions and baby steps

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

15/08/2003 11:31:07 AM, Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Do I have anything beyond the "gut feeling" that many report when they
>see the VMS that they ought to just be able to pick it up and reed it?

Jim can (not Jim Gillogly, the other one. Sorry, couldn't resist :-).

>Yet obviously the authour wanted its contents to remain
>obscure except to the initiated.


This is quite common. When I was a not-yet-teenager I kept a "journal"
(actually a notebook of my "inventions") in various "codes". One I 
remember was just plain French written phonetically in Cyrillic.
Another again was plain French, but this time written in Latin
cursive (lifted from one of Lovecraft's novels) with mock
medieval abbreviations (e.g. a stroke over a vowel to indicate
a nasal).

>So in therefore the only "safe" senario I can envision is if the "key"
>to the VMS is simple enough to be kept in one's head, simple enough that
>the VMS may be "read off" in a single pass, and the nessesity for
>written of physical keys, and the need for worknotes etc, is eliminated.

Sounds sensible.

I'll just repeat here my "improved Chinese theory". Even though
I have posted it here fairly recently.

I happen to be very probably the only non-native speaker of
a language called Sakao. When I learnt it, 30 years ago,
it was spoken by some 1000 natives on the island of Espiritu
Santo (now Vanuatu, then New Hebrides). The language has two
dialects, BTW. It is fairly complicated compared to other
Austronesian languages (internal inflections for instance).
If I wanted to keep notes which no-one but myself could read,
I would merely make up an idiosyncratic alphabet, and write
them in Sakao in that alphabet. To crack my code:

1. You need to crack the alphabet. I'd say you can do that
   only if you have guessed at the language.

2. To guess at the language, you need to know of the existence
   of Sakao (and its two dialects), AND you need to have
   sample texts.

3. I won't elaborate further. I'll just say: this code would
   be uncrackable, short of an extraordinary stroke of luck.

Voynichese is not Sakao because:

1. The letter patterns do no fit.
2. More importantly, Sakao did not exist in 1600 or thereabouts.
   What existed was its ancestor, which can be reconstructed to
   something rather similar to Mota (another language of Vanuatu).

However, the patterns are reminiscent of Chinese-like languages.

Flash back. I was born in the 16th century, and travelled to
China. Or perhaps I was fascinated with languages and met
a Hakka-speaking trader or diplomat in Venice, and set about
learning Hakka (or Holo, or any of the hundreds of possible
candidates). So I am a 16th-century Venitian, the only non-
native Hakka speaker in Europe. It is a pretty sure bet that
no-one will ever decipher my notes if I write them in Hakka in
my own made-up alphabet. Even a Hakka speaker. Would he
imagine that these Latin-looking pages are written in his
own language?

In this hypothesis, deciphering the VMs amounts to deciphering
a text written in an unknown language and an unknown alphabet.

This is was interested me in the VMs. Not the contents,
not who wrote it, not when, not where, but how to solve the 
problem.




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