Re: VMs: VMS Word context similarities

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

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Heikki Qvist wrote:
> Yes. First you have a plaintext, then you chipher it, and then rewrite
> (and maybe rechipher) it with these fancy symbols.

I don't know that there'd be much point in reciphering it, but, of course,
I have no idea what was actually done.  Unless we are able to intuit the
ciphering scheme - and there have certainly been some interesting attempts
at this, with and without spiritual assistance - we're in the position of
having to deduce a function equivalent to the inverse of the composite of
any multiple cipherings.  In effect, we can see only one super-
enciphering.  Even if we came up with a decipherment, we might never know
what the original enciphering process was.

Of course, as you say, whatever has been written is written in Voynich
script.  The simplest assumption is that the text is in the clear, so to
speak, once the script is understood, and my gut feeling is that the
script is peculiar enough both as an artifact and in terms of how its
elements pattern in the text that simply rendering texts in the script
might be the only cryptographic process involved.  An ancient Middle
Eastern scribe faced with an alphabetic text might well be baffled, if he
tried to make it work like a cuineiform logographic-syllabic system.
However, I am not very confident of this "simple encoding" hypothesis.

> I am maybe annoying for you veterans (additionally that I might be
> wrong). So bare me..

Nope - and I'm not really one of the veterans.

> Firstly you should ignore everything about language and consider it as
> raw data and handle it with maths.

If it is a representation of language - and lots of useful written data
isn't language - ignoring it as language would be a rather odd thing.  I
am no cryptographer, but it seems to me that most decipherments depend to
some degree on taking advantage of what we know about langauge.

> Ciphered text doesn't necessarily show the structure of the language
> used to write the plaintext.

I can imagine some sort of holographic technique in use today, but I
suspect that before computers were available ciphered messages would
normally be transformations of the linear text and so would reflect its
linear properties, if in an obscured fashion.



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