If you were to say, "In a simple substitution cipher, one is dealing with for example an individual character $ corresponds to a letter B or an individual character % corresponds to a null."
I would not argue with that. But you specifically referenced diplomatic ciphers, which makes it an incorrect statement.
What really stands out about the Italian diplomatic ciphers is that almost all of them (perhaps all of them) are many-to-one ciphers and quite a number are also one-to-many.
This is important, because it is the primary reason why they require so many symbols to represent one cipher and also why the characters shuffle around within the words to such an extent as they do.
I would not argue with that. But you specifically referenced diplomatic ciphers, which makes it an incorrect statement.
What really stands out about the Italian diplomatic ciphers is that almost all of them (perhaps all of them) are many-to-one ciphers and quite a number are also one-to-many.
This is important, because it is the primary reason why they require so many symbols to represent one cipher and also why the characters shuffle around within the words to such an extent as they do.