Never mind. The forum software nuked my long message.
I have to get back to work. I don't have time to write it all again. Here is the condensed version.
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I've always felt that treating the spaces as nonliteral or possibly as syllable breaks was the quickest and easiest way to change a number of the statistics (including entropy) that are generated by computational attacks.
Since there were some researchers who doubted whether syllable breaks even occurred in medieval text, I collected numerous examples where words have been broken across syllable boundaries. It happens. Not often, but often enough that the concept obviously existed in the Middle Ages. This can especially be seen in maps.
Also, the alchemical manuscript that has ciphers sprinkled through numerous folios, the one that Rene mentioned on the forum several years ago, has a page at the beginning where words have been broken across syllables. My feeling is that this was done in preparation for encipherment. Why? Because 1) the manuscript is full of ciphers and 2) many pieces of folios have been cut out (probably enciphered text, or plaintext), 3) it's obviously not a page about grammar (it has lots of dates and name-dropping, the kind of thing that is more likely to be enciphered).
If the cutout chunks were enciphered text, they may have been sent as a message. If they were plaintext, they may have been the key to the message and were cut out to hide them.
I have always been suspicious of the VMS spaces. I think if any kind of re-arrangement of the VMS text is "legal" this would be high on the list.
I have to get back to work. I don't have time to write it all again. Here is the condensed version.
...
I've always felt that treating the spaces as nonliteral or possibly as syllable breaks was the quickest and easiest way to change a number of the statistics (including entropy) that are generated by computational attacks.
Since there were some researchers who doubted whether syllable breaks even occurred in medieval text, I collected numerous examples where words have been broken across syllable boundaries. It happens. Not often, but often enough that the concept obviously existed in the Middle Ages. This can especially be seen in maps.
Also, the alchemical manuscript that has ciphers sprinkled through numerous folios, the one that Rene mentioned on the forum several years ago, has a page at the beginning where words have been broken across syllables. My feeling is that this was done in preparation for encipherment. Why? Because 1) the manuscript is full of ciphers and 2) many pieces of folios have been cut out (probably enciphered text, or plaintext), 3) it's obviously not a page about grammar (it has lots of dates and name-dropping, the kind of thing that is more likely to be enciphered).
If the cutout chunks were enciphered text, they may have been sent as a message. If they were plaintext, they may have been the key to the message and were cut out to hide them.
Koen wrote:Removing spaces has an extremely beneficial effect, but I felt uncertain about how "legal" this step was.
I have always been suspicious of the VMS spaces. I think if any kind of re-arrangement of the VMS text is "legal" this would be high on the list.