VMs: Re: Letters bound later?

["Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Welcome Christoph! Your ideas are similar to some I have recently had and
involved Della Porta being involved in the production of the VMS. I still
feel this might be an answer, although recently a more intriguing suggestion
has arisen which revolves around Jacobus de Tepenec. If you review the
recent mail archives to will get the gist of the topic.

Jeff


----- Original Message -----
From: "Christoph M. Wintersteiger" <christoph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 23 March 2004 00:48
Subject: VMs: Letters bound later?


>
> 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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