Re: VMs: Strange or not?

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

3/01/2005 1:27:43 PM, Eric <mynumberis2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>Back in the archives I read where Jacques was arguing
>(in his notation of ct <-> c't for ch <-> sh) that
>they were dialect variations of each other from the
>Currier A (ct) and B (c't) authors (one's "lord" was
>another's "laird" for instance).

That was in a Cryptologia article, where I argued
that the distribution of <e> and <o> (my <c> and <o>)
was very significantly different in Currier A and 
in Currier B, just like you say as in British
English "lord" and in Scots English "laird"


>It could also simply be a homophonic substitution
>where ch and sh both represent the same underlying
>letter.

As far as I remember, that could not be the case
for <e> and <o>.

Next, this e/o substitution is a very common
occurrence, which you find not only across
dialects of English, but within the grammatical
paradigms of a language (Proto-Indoeuropean is
an example), across related languages (I have
observed it in Austronesian, e.g. *tolu ->
/ten/ in Shark Bay--I'll spare you the tons
of examples I could dig out), and within slangs
of the same language (e.g. Japanese teenagers'
"use ye!" for "uso yo!"--meaning: "that's a lie!").

That also led me to suspect that <e> was the
letter "e" and <o> the letter "o" (I have
also argued elsewhere, in Cryptologia and in
the archives, that <ee> is the letter "a",
and a variant of <a>).


>work ;-). After that, I'd take
>a guess at:

>a - within statistical fluctuation. That should be
>testable.

In the case of e/o the distribution is not a
matter of statistical fluctuation, it is 
systematic, just like, in an English text,
you do not find a "lord" here, a "laird" there,
a "nae" here, a "not" there.

>b - the author was being very careful and keeping
>counts on the number of instances of every letter they
>were using and purposefully evening the counts out.

Most unlikely. Just try and do it and you'll see why.

>c - the author(s) were transcribing and enciphering
>the exact same underlying text in places but using
>different substitutions.

That would be possible. But then why they would be
repeating the same text in the same book.



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