Quote:-JKP- Wrote:
Many examples of litterae elongatae have been posted to the thread and "Item" which is the "is" abbreviation added to capital-I and t have also been posted numerous times.
Many close analogues have been posted. To me, none was a 100% exact VMS gallows; all were flawed in some way and my objections were posted upthread. Obviously views of "100% accuracy" may vary.
Quote:-JKP- Wrote:
Quote: wrote:My point remains though, why put a capital in the middle of a word, as happens throughout the VMS?If we knew for certain that the VMS was a cipher (we don't know whether it is, but let's say for a moment that it is) then a good cryptanalyst would never assume that a space is a word boundary.
- We don't know if it's the middle of a word; we only know that they occur within tokens.
-Yes exactly, perhaps this is an indication of that very thing.
- Lowercase letters are not always short. In western languages, the letters b, l, h, d, f, s, and others, all have ascenders and they are not considered capital letters.
-All of those will result in a loop down the bottom, which is not a standard VMS gallows. l is possible but I have not seen a gallows resulting from it yet. I think my Visigoth study was enough to establish "thin on the ground".
- Why assume the gallows are capital letters? They are glyphs, or possibly combinations of glyphs. They aren't even necessarily letters—they might be numbers.
-Because your best example was Item, which is a capital. But we could equally well ask what a suffix may be doing in the middle of a word?
-You just told Emma upthread that the VMS glyph usage was more typical of standard scribal abbreviations, rather than a cipher.
All I am trying to do is to follow to a logical conclusion your interesting observation that scribal abbreviations are followed systematically in the VMS. Of course, I am Jon Snow and know nothing!