Alternatives to alphabet?

[-JKP-]

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What you also see there that 1 letter can be represented differently not only at beginning-middle-end but also also in relation to other letters.
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Yes, or along the same line of thinking, letters could be represented differently depending which word it is in the sentence.

Think about it... what's the longest line of text in the VMS? Most lines are only about a dozen words long. The author appears reluctant to break a word across lines.

Word position could determine coding. If it person enciphering it used charts only about a dozen plus a few extra charts would be needed to encode each word differently, which is less than some of the unwieldy chart systems that were invented in the 16th and 17th centuries. If more variety were desired, a marker at the beginning of each paragraph could indicate a shift or starting point within the same system.

One of the consequences of this kind of encipherment scheme is that words with identical letters next to each other would be different words. There would also be more subtle pattern variations between the beginnings and ends of lines (which is something that does occur in the VMS).


I'm not saying this is how it was done, because there is a pairing element to the VMS letter combinations that would not be adequately explained by this method, but I have been interested in looking at the structure of the words and what might result in the kinds of patterns that are prevalent in the VMS because one-to-one substitution codes (and some of the other kinds of codes people have been trying) don't LOOK or behave like VMS text once they are enciphered. Different encipherment methods have an overall look-and-feel just as the patterns of geological crystals have an overall look-and-feel that distinguishes them from others.