[split] Verbose cipher?

[nickpelling]

It's depressing to see verbose ciphers treated exactly like all the delusional attempts at simple substitution. The fact that verbose ciphers are trillions of times more complex seems to go unnoticed. Actually, the added complexity risks being welcome to the delusional solver, who only sees more room to play around.

This is a good point that doesn't often get made. For me, the reason for looking to verbose cipher mechanisms for some of the answers is that there is a low-level persistent artificiality in the way glyphs combine that fails to match 'pure' language models.

Everyone acknowledges the presence of common groups (such as qo, ol, al, or, ar, ain, aiin, etc), so the bulk of what verbose cipher explanations try to bring to the table is not exactly a surprise.

It's true that there are a number of edge cases (such as dy, y- + gallows, etc) that are hard to work out: but I don't think that this contributes to a high degree of 'play'.

Ultimately, the actual statistics constrain all the degrees of freedom very sharply, so I don't really think there are trillions of good verbose cipher arrangements to consider.

Moreover, there is a good-sized overlap between verbose cipher parsings and 'normal' parsings to consider, one that EVA sidesteps. For example, is ii a single glyph? What about ee and eee?