VMs: Letters bound later?

["Christoph M. Wintersteiger" <christoph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello there,

I'm a student of computer science from Austria (native German, if someone 
needs something...) with heavy interest in cryptography. I'm new to the 
group; I hope you forgive me, if I roll up an idea that has previousely 
been examined: As a matter of fact, I don't know a lot about the VMS, I 
have only recently heard about it and read some pages on the internet. 
Although I probably don't know enough facts about the manuscript yet, the 
very first idea I had, when I saw some scans of pages and then read about 
the possibility of multiple Languages/Codes being used throughout the 
document, was that it could be a collection of letters, that were either 
received from different sources by one person, or copies of the outgoings 
plus the original incomings. I know that it was a common thing to collect 
letters and then have them bound to a book (usually without a title on the 
cover or title pages up front) at a later time, as Goethe (about the most 
famous german writer; 1749-1832) refers to that practice in his biography. 
This would explain a lot of things, first being the different 
Languages/Codes. If there were multiple authors, they would of course use 
different words to form their sentences and - if this idea has any foot to 
stand on - that one of them uses more elaborate words than the other, as I 
would expect the letters to be a conversation between a teacher/scholar and 
a student or interested person, probably a handyman. Of course there would 
have to be differences in the style of writing as well; One would write the 
symbols a little bit different than the other - even if there were very 
strict rules about the symbols, they would have to differ a little bit, as 
one person never writes exactly like another.
Another thing is why there was a code used at all: A person writing a book 
(probably a diary of ideas or something alike) wouldn't design a completely 
new and so complex (as it seems) cypher, just to make his own life hard 
when he wants to reads his notes lateron in his life. Even if it were notes 
that were meant to be kept by the author alone, but nobody else should be 
able to read them, he wouldn't have used this kind of encryption, but 
rather a simple one, or at least a derivation of the known codes of the 
time. On the other hand: If he was so crazy as to design an encryption like 
this, the probablity that someone of those knowing the code - and if it was 
not meant for conversational exchange of messages, people that the author 
has hinted about the code - would have laid a trace from the past up to 
today. The reason why I'm thinking that is that it looks like a very well 
designed encryption, that only a mathematician or similiar can have 
designed and if someone, even at that time, designed an encryption that 
even today we cannot break, he sure would have known about the value of it 
and sold the idea to the army, a king or something alike.
Concluding from those thoughts and holding on to the letters idea and the 
idea that a code of that quality cannot have made sense to be used by one 
person exclusively, I get the impression, that it cannot only have been two 
people that took part in this work. Another hint is the range of topics 
apparantly covered in the manuscript. If there are no hints of different 
authors in the style of writing, it might still be a transcript of oral 
conversations - probably a group of people (scientists?) developed, or 
tried to develop, new ideas and had a writer at their hand to collect 
those. Some of the pages I saw contained only pictures, some only text and 
some both; Those of which contained both, mostly seemed to me as if the 
pictures were done first and the text added lateron, which gives me the 
idea of the pictures being scientific (for that time) drafts; Maybe the 
scientists were drawing things onto paper so they could better talk about 
what they were thinking of in the meetings and the writer then kept those 
drawings and added the text - no text to the big drawings and a lot of text 
around sheets that only contained small drawings - as paper wasn't cheap. 
This would legitimate the use of a cypher at all as well as the quality of 
it, as there were the capable men to develop such an encryption, as well as 
a lot of new scientific (or similiar) ideas, that shouldn't have left the 
group of scientists, at least not before fully developped - as we know, at 
those ages people were burned for the wrong ideas, etc.

It would be very interesting to see if the sections of the manuscript could 
be seperated into documents that could form a detached document like a 
letter or an evening of oral conversations transcript. Another thing of 
great interest to me would be the time it took to create the manuscript - 
If there are hints that make it appear as written in one session, or 
throughtout one or more lifetimes.


Again, please don't be angry at me if my ideas are the same ones that 
everybody has when new to this - I'm still trying to learn about the 
manuscript.
If anyone needs statistical or other data about the german language, I 
might be of help, as I have the more than enough german language ressources 
around here and I'm willing to invest some time doing statistical analysis 
as well.

Thanks a lot for reading,

CM Wintersteiger

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