1995/1/9, posted by Robert Firth
1. A Preliminary Observation
Look at the MS. It was written fluently and at speed. This is proven, in my view, by the elegance of the hands, and by the length of text between successive refills of the pen, which can be inferred from the density of the ink. It is written in a script that I have argued elsewhere was devised explicitly to promote a fast, cursive hand.
If the text contains meaning, then, that meaning could be encoded very quickly, or at least copied very quickly. And I believe the copyist was not transcribing opaque cypher text, but understood the meaning, and the evidence for this is the vanishingly small number of seeming transcription errors we have found in the corpus. Contrast, for instance, Brumbaugh's numerous transcription errors, which, by the way, are to me clear proof that his alleged deciperment is bogus.
2. Possible Cyphers
So, if the VMS is a cypher text, the cypher must be very simple. It must be readable virtually at sight. Of the set of "dense" cyphers - those where most of the encoded text is signal - I think that rules out anything more complex than a "gold bug" substitution cypher. Not to mention, of course, that nothing more complex was even known in the fourteenth century.
Indeed, even that is too difficult for most "secret" communications, especially those of occult or secret societies, who are a desperately verbose bunch and therefore tend to adopt simple cyphers. One obvious example is the Caesar cypher, based not on a random substitution but on a simple cyclic shift of the alphabet. Another are the Masonic cyphers, most of which are based on a rectangular grid, populated by letters, and with each cypher symbol a glyph designating a part of the grid. You can learn such a cypher in half an hour, and become fluent in it in an afternoon.
3. Is it Gibberish?
No, it isn't. We have applied to this demon-haunted document the best and most powerful quantitative tests of twentieth-century linguistics, and they all tell us the same thing: there is meaning in the MS; *it is language*.
posted by ぶらたん at 08:41|
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