LJS 51 Collection of alphabets and encoded correspondence

[MarcoP]

I did some work on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., where I noticed a sequence (looking like l99o) repeated 3 times in both cipher and plain text.

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Since I can’t type Arabic, I transcribed the red letters using the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (ASCII based). I certainly made a few errors in the process, since some Arabic characters are similar to each other. ‘:’ stands for the |-with-three-dots.

Transcription:

f w A : H s r t A h : w w A : E
r b t A h : w w A : w H $ t
A h : w w A : A s z A h :
l q d : S n E : A l d h r :
b Y : m A : t r Y : f Y A : l Y
t : $ E r Y : A m A : q d :
k f A h :


I used the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to “deromanize” the Buckwalter text:

فوا حسرتاه ووا عربتاه ووا وحشتاه ووا اسزاه  لقد صنع الدهر بى ما ترى فىا لىت شعرى اما قد كفاه

The “deromanized” text matches well the plain-text from the page.
   

Claude, ChatGPT and google translate provide comparable translations from Arabic.

Oh my sorrow! Oh my tears! Oh my loneliness! Oh my grief! Time has done to me what you see. Alas, I wonder, has it not been enough?

The recurring fragment I noticed apparently is an exclamation:

ووا (wa-wā) - and oh

Conclusions:

• These are simple substitutions (much simpler than contemporary European diplomatic ciphers).
  
• They use a cipher character to represent word separation. Since the Arabic script typically represented word separation by different glyph shapes, rather than spaces, it makes sense that they had to find ways to manage this in a cipher-text. European diplomatic ciphers simply dropped word spaces, but this could introduce too much ambiguity with an abjad. 
  
• Ciphers are presented “by example”, showing the cipher-text together with a poetic plain-text. This is again different from European diplomatic practice that used cipher tables.