Re: VMs: Letters bound later?

[elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Zitat von "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.

Hi Christoph,

Welcome from a fellow Teuton to the wacky world of VM decryiption... ;-) 
There's positively no reason to apologize. In the contrary, it's always good to 
have new faces putting forth new opinions. I've been involved with the VM for 
some three months only, and I already feel I'm beginning to develop tunnel 
vision...
 
> Although I probably don't know enough facts about the manuscript yet, ... it 
> could be a collection of letters, 

That's an interesting one. I don't think I've heard it before, and it would 
explain the different styles quite naturally. IIRC, languages A and B are used 
in "blocks" throughout the manuscript, but of course this could be due to the 
letters being sorted by recipient/sender, rather than by time.

> ...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.

Gordon Ruggs lately performed an experiment to create Voynichese-like gibberish 
with an automated algorithm, and he reported it took him something like "under 
two hours" to come up with a page -- though it's not quite clear whether this 
meant the text generation only, or whether this included actually writing down 
and painting the pictures etc.

IIRC, another source did facsimiles in the "VM style" and also reported working 
times of not more than several hours per page. (Mind you, most of the drawings 
are comparatively crude.)

So, in all likelihood (unless the encoding algorithm is astronomically 
complex), it was possible for a single person to create the VM within a few 
months.

> 
> ...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.

Awesome!

Actually, my pet theory is that the VM is German in origin, and the reason 
nobody noticed is that it's not current High German, but one of the dialects 
spoken around 1450 (which appears to be the date of the creation of the VM).

Do you have statistics for that time as well, or would you even have some 
insight in language peculiarities of German back then? (I think of stuff like 
the scharf-s only appearing at the end of a word, while some VM letters only 
seem to appear at their beginning -- "words written backwards?", and things 
like that.)

> 
> Thanks a lot for reading,
> 
> CM Wintersteiger
> 

Feel free to get in touch with me offlist (elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx),

Cheerio,

   Elmar


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