On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[-JKP-]

I notice that in two of the cases you show here, the o would have collided with another o. That may have been enough of a reason to sometimes write it separately.

That could be the case - maybe he wanted to separate the o's. On the other hand there are examples of <qoos> and <qooko>, so who knows.

Or for all we know, 4o can be a standalone unite as well. Like 'on' or 'in' in English, for example.

Those are very correct words: "for all we know"

There are a number of ways to look at this. Some examples that come immediately to mind are:


1. 4o could be an extension of 4, with 4 being "q" and 4o being "qu". Most languages have combinations that are more common than others.

or...

2. One can think of 4o as being something like "pro" (a common Latin abbreviation) and, if it were, then perhaps 4 by itself might be "pre" (another common Latin abbreviation). Thus, they could be conceptually related in terms of first letter and historic precedent.

or...

3. 4 and 4o could be two unrelated assignments. For example, the Luetz code that I summarized on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., uses the 4 to represent "a" and 4o to represent "p", with a single glyph having the same alphabetic "value" as a double glyph and the similarity in shape being superficial (or intentionally misleading). Thus, in the VMS, the 4o might be "qu" and a 4 might be something less frequently used, like a number perhaps.

or...

4. The 4 could be a character or sound, syllable or concept, and the o could be a modifier. In English, we use -s for plurals, un- to negate, -ly to change the grammatical sense from noun to adverb. These are different kinds of modifiers. Consider the high frequency of the letter "o" in the VMS and how many of them seem to always be in the same position in the word, just as we put -s at the end of words to create plurals. Or it could be that the 4 itself is a modifier, one that's not frequently needed. As long as its meaning is known, it wouldn't matter where in the word it was positioned so the designer chose the beginning.


I can think of quite a few other possibilities, but that's enough to get the idea.