[Article] Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script

[Anton]

Koen:

I (still) haven't read the paper attentively, but my first impression has been that they do not argue anything definite in this respect. They are fine with the precondition that the text is anagrammed, and that this anagramming appears random from the viewpoint of the observer (i.e. no rule is observed). Whether there is a rule actually or whether there is not - what answer they assume to this question, I cannot say from only having glanced at the paper briefly. Maybe they assume nothing.

Anyway, I recognize two possibilities for anagramming not to introduce a one way encryption:

a) there is a deterministic procedure
b) there is no deterministic procedure, but encrypted words are anagrammed into vords on a 1-to-1 basis. E.g., a word "milk" is continuosly represented as "kmil" throughout the entire text, and the word "apple" - as "palep". A person accustomed to "milk "as "klim" and to "apple" as "palep" will have no difficulties in decryption, although there is no signle procedure which will reverse "klim" to "milk" and "apple" to "palep" both at the same time. Essentially this is anagrammic reference mapping of the whole vocabulary.


Option a) will have no problems with abjad, option b) will most probably have.

Not to say that the solution is as simple as anagrammed abjad - I don't think so. There are indicators that something more complex is going on there - mostly the combined characters (benched gallows in the first place, but not exclusively them), and also the gallows coverage. Combined characters suggest some kind of superposition (like, you know, in "XIV" "X" combined with "IV" is mapped to 14, while "I" combined with "V" is mapped to 4), while gallows coverage suggest some kind of operator applied to the glyphs covered. Both ideas reach beyond simple substitution and anagramming, whether abjad or not.