Re: VMs: Blanks

[knoxmix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hello Maurizio,

    On 02 Mar 2004 at 22:09:31 +0000
    Nick Pelling wrote:

    Hi Maurizio,

    At 19:01 02/03/2004 +0100, Maurizio Gavioli wrote:
    >Does anyone with a greater familiarity with late medieval / early 
    modern
    >cyphers can summarize the status of the blank in them?

    AFAIK, usually removed - they make it too easy to guess words. :-)

    My guess is that some magical ciphers may rely on the shapes of their
    letters for their power (rather than their unreadability), so there 
    might be examples of ciphers where spaces were retained.

    I also don't know if there is a date before which people didn't think 
    to remove spaces at all.

    >I mean: there are occurrences of cyphers ignoring the blanks 
    altogether?
    >And of cyphers *restoring* 'faked' blanks (randomly?) in the cripted
    >text?

    I don't recall any of the sources I've read on early cryptography 
    specifically mentioning the reversible coding of blanks in 
    ciphertext, but it's certainly possible. For example, in the past 
    I've suggested a "space transposition cipher": this would work by 
    removing real spaces and inserting fake spaces at plausible-looking 
    syllable ends (say).

    ie: fo rex amp leint hepas ti vesug ge ste dasp acet ran spo siti 
    oncip her. :-)

    This is, however, purely conjecture on my part (and is only "mostly 
    reversible"). :-o

    >Or, at the other end, of cyphers considering the blank a character 
    in
    >itself, taking part to the cripting algorithm?

    Again, it's certainly possible, but I don't know of any recorded 
    examples in early cryptography. My instinct would be that this would 
    have been conceptually unlikely in Europe before the advent of 
    printing (because it requires seeing space as a serialised printed 
    character), and only vaguely plausible after that (because thinking 
    in ASCII is a modern peculiarity). :-o

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


Also see:
Some Important New Statistical Findings by Captain Prescott H. 
Currier.

http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich/rand/currier.paper

He regarded the line as a functional entity.

And said:

". . . some `'word'-finals have an obvious and statistically-
significant effect on the initial symbol of a following 'word'. This 
is almost exclusively to be found in `Language' B, and especially in 
`Biological B'  material."

I take that to mean an effect distinct from any effect within a 
"word".    (?)

Of course, letter sequence could have been altered between 
artificially created spaces -- or creation of artificial spaces could 
have been influenced by certain letters or adjacent letters. 

There might be further comments about those items on the Internet.

Ciao ............. Knox

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