Alternatives to alphabet?

[-JKP-]

Nice idea, but such coding is way too complex for that exact time according to several cipher books (i will remain in the years 1400-1475)

Anyway following the question of this thread, "Alternatives to alphabet?" what do you propose ?

Personally, I think decoding based on analysis of the structure of the VMS text, which does not follow common systems of the time, is going to be more fruitful than excluding systems that were not common.


Did you know the video tape systems were invented a century before they actually came into commercial production? Inventions are usually known by the most prominent person who used or promoted them, but those "inventors" are almost always following on the coattails of mavericks and inventive people who created such things decades earlier who used them rather than documenting or selling them. Bell didn't invent the telephone. Meucci did it long before, but Bell saw Meucci's papers and had the visibility and ambition to claim it as his own.

Chart systems were common in the 16th and 17th centuries but that usually means SOMEONE was using them in the preceding century. Code wheels existed in the late 15th century, but that means someone (probably in the Arabic world, which was a couple of centuries ahead of the western world in terms of cipher science) probably created them earlier than that.

[crezac]

How about this possibility.  It's a personal shorthand of the scribe.  Just like someone today might text "I'll B L8"  it could uses the normal alphabet and add characters to compress common words or parts of words into a single character.   Someone using such a shorthand would also be likely to abbreviate which would further complicate reading their work. If you're copying information from a book you don't own, all you want is the information - and you want to get the copying done as fast as possible - so as long as you can read your text it's a good copy. 

Your apprentice might be taught the same system and inherit your notebook which could account for multiple scribes.  Or several people might use the same system and visit different libraries to bring back new knowledge and have all their notes bound into a single volume.

[-JKP-]

How about this possibility.  It's a personal shorthand of the scribe.  Just like someone today might text "I'll B L8"  it could uses the normal alphabet and add characters to compress common words or parts of words into a single character.   Someone using such a shorthand would also be likely to abbreviate which would further complicate reading their work...
...

Like the Ricky McCormick style of writing (I hesitate to call it a code as it may not be).

[crezac]

Nope, not a code, just a more efficient way to copy texts or take notes.  It would look like a code since you couldn't read it without knowing the system.   There's the additional complication that the system is probably used at each scribe's option so a word could be spelled out completely and abbreviated within the same paragraph.  Frequency analysis is of limited use with a single document to define your language, bu having multiple representations of the same word would skew its utility even more.

The Ricky McCormick writings strike me as a mnemonic text, like R43L5r12 for a combination or r42l4.5m2i9 for street directions.  I think VMS is too large a document to have a mnemonic function.

[Koen G]

Crezac, I mostly agree with that. Though I think the difference is in an ornate representation of sounds versus a simple one in ligatures or abbreviations. Either way, the results are the same: frequency analysis becomes very, very hard.