[Article] Lindemann and Bowern (2020) is available

[RenegadeHealer]

Emma, I started an experiment where I took a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., rendered it with Japanese katakana, and then used a simple algorithm to swap each katakana glyph with another in the standard 5x10 grid (gojūon) that Japanese speakers use to order their language's phonology. I wanted to see whether anyone could figure out that it was Psalm 23 after all of these steps. I was motivated to try this experiment after reading Mark Knowles' thread about making an unbreakable cipher. I didn't end up finishing it or posting it, but I have no doubt you guys here would have little trouble decoding it. I ended up concluding that it's very hard to make a code that no one without the key can decode. However, it's not hard to make a code that's relatively easy for people with specific background knowledge to decode, but dauntingly difficult for anyone who lacks that background knowledge, and has no idea where to find someone who has it.

I'm very intrigued to consider what remnants of distinction can be found by the interaction between glyphs.

What immediately comes to mind here are the hints that the VMs text may have been written and retouched in multiple passes. Specifically JKP and Brian Cham's observations that many "plumes" or "flourishes" (the stroke that turns EVA e into s, or EVA i into r) appear to have been added later, in a different shade of ink. This makes me wonder if the creator of the VMs text found the encoding system too lossy even for him/herself to decode reliably, such that (s)he went back later and added in some extra hints.