21-07-2020, 06:31 AM
(21-07-2020, 05:42 AM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...But why only picking those two? ..
Because I can see reasons for those being more likely than some of the other possibilities, and proposing too many possibilities at once doesn't appear to be as productive in terms of discussion.
Quote:About the specific ideas you put forward:
Filler text at the end of lines would result in line-end words being longer than the others, and this is not the case: according to Elmar Vogt, they are actually shorter. Also, the idea of statistically relevant filler text is somehow anachronistic, since it appears to have been introduced by Trithemius half a century after the VMS was created. In his application of the method, the cipher text has a TTR close to 1, while (as amply discussed by Koen) the VMS has figures similar to plain-text.
Why would line-end filler be longer? It seems to me if you are filling whatever space is left to make the right-hand column line up (to double-justify the text), then the filler text might be quite short and would not necessarily affect every line. Filler can have spaces.
There is evidence in the VMS that some of it might be filler (put "might" in capitals because I'm not at all sure—rather than filler, this might be an artifact of vertically-written blocks of text). These two folios in particular suggest the possibility: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f81v They appear to be related in terms of general layout, and they are on the same sheet, and yet one is ragged (left-justified) and the other is double-justified.
Quote:I guess that by "line-end-marker" symbols you mean specific abbreviations, as in the tiny fragments with "etc" you posted. I must say that calling "etc" a "marker" seems misleading to me. As you probably know, I like the idea that EVA:m/g are abbreviations, but I am not aware of this hypothesis resulting in evidence for hyphenation.
I'm hesitant to call them specific abbreviations because symbols in the VMS that resemble medieval abbreviations (in form or position) might have a different function in the VMS, that's why I substituted the word "marker" (it might not be the best word but at least it does not carry as many assumptions).
The VMS frequently uses a glyph that resembles a paragraph-end marker (g, m) in many of the same positions as one would find it in medieval plaintext. Such a glyph might obfuscate line-break statistics if it is treated as a letter rather than as... a marker something else.