On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[Davidsch]

@marco:  You can find specific letters in many scripts, in many languages, but when you simply make a chart and count them, you always get already more than 17 / 22 /26 letters in those scripts.

If you make then the positional chart you can simply compare those. SYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. But I pointed that out many times already, and I'm sorry if I'm bothersome with that. The point is, you can then see in one view if you can make match, for any language and what the shifts are. Yes, also when the letters have been substituted.

In my opinion it is much more interesting to look at individual letters and the usage of those letters (and the transcript of those) in the same period.
Looking at those, it is also obvious that some degree of "horizontal and vertical repeats" are common. Although in the VMS they are more frequent.

Take for example:
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(can not upload because it is 598kb...)

[Common_Man]

I don't think I have the expertise to post in this thread, but IMHO some people seem to think of VMS as a deliberately ciphered latin text, while it can be something that appears ciphered due to a very weird writing system which we are not familiar about.

I think it is worth remembering here what You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

The difference between the script and the language is a really important one, because it could be that the underlying language is one that is known to us, but what stops us from getting there is just the script that's lying above it. And this is an element of the research which many people just don't seem to get. Even in recent discussions on the internet you get people confusing the issues of the script and language.

Just like Stephen bax said above, this writing system may have some weird property that makes it hard to decode.

I myself live in Southern India (Kerala), and my native language, Malayalam has a style of writing in which to every consonant sound, has a short /a/ vowel added to it by default, unless indicated otherwise by a diacritical mark (one that indicates another wovel sound, or even a mark for lack of the short /a/ vowel to make it sound more like the way we'd expect as english speakers.

Proof -

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So even if you write a known language like english, in this script, all the /a/ sounds would be omitted, and there'd be weird diacritical marks at places where we'd not normally expect.

So I would give VMS the benefit of doubt and look at it as a natural language...

[-JKP-]

...

I myself live in Southern India (Kerala), and my native language, Malayalam has a style of writing in which to every consonant sound, has a short /a/ vowel added to it by default, unless indicated otherwise by a diacritical mark (one that indicates another wovel sound, or even a mark for lack of the short /a/ vowel to make it sound more like the way we'd expect as english speakers.

...

The convention of adding a vowel by default was echoed in the Latin script of the Medieval period by adding a tail to the letter (which creates a shape very much like those in old Gujurati and other Indic scripts). Thus, in Latin, r with a tail becames "ra" (or r with another vowel such as re or re, since in Latin the tail could represent various vowels).

The shape on the left of sha and sa in old Gujurati is used as a scribal convention in Medieval Latin to represent ra (and r with other vowels). In Gujurati the tail swings down, in Latin the tail swings up to the left, but the concept is the same.

I blogged about this (you have to scroll down 2/3 of the way to see the section on Indic languages and implied vowels, particularly the vowel /a/ when it is Indic script) and described the similarity between Indic scripts and Medieval Latin scripts in terms of implied vowels—a similarity that disappeared when modern Latin dropped the scribal conventions:

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[MarcoP]

Thank you and welcome, Common_Man!
I hope you will stick around with the forum. I am sure that our discussions can only be enriched by a less Eurocentric point of view!