[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[-JKP-]

I have given the example several times of the page of text in pal.germ.569 ("Cisiolanis", 1426) that has had spaces added between syllables. There are also a few abbreviations and words broken across lines.

The content of the page does not indicate that it has anything to do with grammar or Latin lessons, it is full of dates and names, the kind of things people like to encipher, so it is my contention that this is text that has been processed in anticipation of turning it into ciphertext:

   

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For example, "nobile lumen" has been broken into "no bi le lu men" and "maria genitrice" has been broken into "ma ri a ge ni tri ce" by adding spaces.


So, if one accepts the proposal the text was being processed in anticipation of being ciphered (the rest of the ms. is full of ciphertext and pages that have been cut out), then spaces have clearly been added to the preprocessed text, possibly to obfuscate word lengths and word endings.

If one does not accept that the text was being processed in anticipation of being ciphered, I would be interested in hearing other explanations for the added spaces.