Re: VMs: What are Neal keys

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Borek,

At 17:09 12/08/2004 +0200, Borek Lupomesky wrote:
>    I see number of references to "Neal keys" in this list, but I fail to 
> find any description of what they are. Could anyone provide link or 
> something, that would introduce this thing to us newcomers?

On the first line of text (and typically about 60%-70% along that line) on 
many pages, you can often find an accentuated pair of gallows (normally 
p-gallows) containing a text sequence - these are Neal keys. For example, 
the first line of f104r has a number of p-gallows, but the pair 2/3rds of 
the way along seems the most likely candidate:-

        qo__p__chedy shedaiin oteeo chey qo__p__chedy    (uncapitalised 
for clarity)

[Here, the repetition of "qopchedy" at the start and finish makes me 
suspect that it is a null, and that this Neal key's real payload is 
"shedaiin oteeo chey".]

Philip Neal first pointed these out to me a few years ago, so I'd look for 
a proper description from him - AFAIK he was the first to notice them 
(hence their name), but I don't know if he's undertaken a systematic check 
for them since the sidfiles arrived.

BTW, one feature of these I've occasionally noticed is that if you try to 
decompose these into typical Voynichese frequent pairs, they often don't 
pair up quite as nicely as "normal" Voynichese, so that (for example) you 
may end up with free-standing "o" characters. This is a similar property to 
some of the text contained within "split gallows" (extended gallows with 
letters between the legs), which makes me suspect that they are all 
manifestations of the same crypto mechanism.

FWIW, I suspect that Neal keys function as a transposition cipher, whereby 
a key local to a section is set up inside a split gallows or between a 
top-line gallows pair, using an alternate code-page: then, whenever a 
gallows occurs, a character is read out sequentially from that same key. 
ie, gallows characters would then be tokens that mean something like "read 
the next letter out from the preceding Neal key". But that's another story...

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

PS: has anyone calculated what the odds are that the first line of a page 
contains a p-gallows? And what are the odds for any other line of text? Now 
there's a nice exercise for the reader... :-) 


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