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Re: VMs: Italian phrases
Hi Jeff,
At 20:59 12/11/2003 +0000, Jeff wrote:
I have got so far:
so il leda
accosti deio nelle
elle mio dicchi
soille michi
Any ideas on whether they mean anything?
If you statistically examine at a glyph transcription of the VMs (let alone
an EVA transcription, which is even worse), you'll find that different
letters are strongly predictable from their context.
Basic computer science (or what one might call "foundational computer
science") says that these letters therefore contain (or express) very
little intrinsic information. If you're suggesting a method by which you
specify a different table for each possible preceding letter (as I believe
you are), what you're effectively doing is encoding all that missing
information in those tables.
The problem then isn't making 11 words in a row look plausibly like a given
language - depending on the tables and methodology you're using, that (as
you have found) is quite manageable. Instead, the problem is making *220
(or so) pages* work in the same kind of way (which I'd guess is roughly
2500x more difficult).
I'd also say: double letters are problematic - in ciphers from the same
time frame, doubled-letters were thought to be the second easiest way
(after vowel-frequency analysis) for code-breakers to "get in", so these
were usually just converted to single letters (or extra symbols were added
to code for particular doubled letters). The presence of doubled letters in
your plaintext alone is sufficient to make me strongly doubt its
correctness, never mind any other aspects.
All the same, the real test isn't what I happen to think, but what the rest
of the deciphered text looks like - I'm sure this would give you the real
result, rather than just 11 words :-o
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
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