Re: VMs: Re: RE: VMS Lookalike encipherment

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 21:24 12/07/2005 +0100, Jeff Haley wrote:
> On the subject of null detection I am open minded. Though I
> would have to think a little about what you describe to determine
> how easy it would be to identify nulls in a verbose cipher. The
> first problem is to reconstruct the verbose elements with enough
> accuracy in the first place and as Nick Pelling has rightly said
> there are some problems with my initial identifications.

I'm sure you'll move closer with your next iteration. :-)

BTW, one interesting thing in the thread was about the issue of whether, if 
EVA <o> is a fake letter solely used to construct verbose digraphs (like 
qo, or, ol, etc), two adjacent fake <o>s would elide into a single one - 
ie, should <qo.ol> contract to <qol>? Fortunately, <qol> only seems to 
occur in pages where free-standing and word-initial <l>s occur, which 
suggests that whatever <qo> and <ol> represent, <qo> cannot be followed by 
<ol>.

Simialrly, there are related issues with <cho> and <chol> in Voynichese 
(particularly in Currier A, IIRC): I strongly suspect that <ch> and <cho> 
are tokens that code for quite separate things, and that <chol> can only 
decompose into <ch.ol>, never <cho[o]l>: ie, that <cho> can never be 
followed by <ol> in the underlying language. Another thing to inform your 
choice of tokens, Jeff! :-)

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


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