Re: VMs: Strange or not?

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Eric wrote:
> Maybe they count... What I mean is, I fully agree they are graphically
> deliberate differences - not only between c and s but also t and k
> (looking at the actual scanned images at instances of t and k, it is
> clear to me that the author meant each one as written and that they are
> not just sloppy versions of each other due to variances in writing).
> However, that doesn't require they mean different things if we are going
> for a cryptographic explanation - that's how a homophonetic cipher
> works. Looking at some of the Trachedino ciphers, very similar looking
> characters were used to represent the same underlying character.

OK, but this does strike me as a bit counterproductive.  If two -
homophonetic? - characters are sufficiently similar looking the effect is
more decorative than confusing, sort of like encrypting English by adding
little twiddles at random to the top or bottom of the letters.  It might
confuse someone who couldn't read English, but it wouldn't confuse anyone
who could.  Even if the English was already encrypted, this
"entwiddlement" wouldn't do a good deal to hide things once anyone had
deduced the system, or even if they just decided to eliminate the
decorative twiddles.

If I were designing a Voynichish sort of script to hide something I think
I'd make the things that looked very similar mean rather different things
and the things that looked rather different mean the same thing.  I might
feel differently if I were designing it to look pretty.



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