04-12-2025, 05:35 PM
I'm not sure this discussion really changes anyone's opinion. To me it's extremely implausible that a person would create a manuscript in a custom alphabet to represent phonetics of a foreign language and would neither include any notes in their own language nor a sample of the original foreign writing. For me it would require some strong evidence to point towards the Oriental origin to circumvent this omission.
The only situation this would make sense to me if the goal of the author was to conceal the information in the first place. If it was so, there is no reason to presume that the author was trying to preserve the original phonetics rather than obfuscate them, and essentially we have a ciphertext hypothesis with a foreign plaintext. Then we have the very same problems as with the other ciphertext solutions, it's unlikely to be a simple substitution or any one-to-one cipher due to implausible statistics for repeated word combinations, and one-to-many (for example, homophonic) ciphers are fairly hard to break. Adding on top of this the possibility of an old lost version of the original language and an old lost version of the original text, we are in the realms of ciphers nearly impossible to solve. So, after many suppositions and assumptions we probably come to a dead end, same as with many competing theories. What's the benefit of this approach?
The only situation this would make sense to me if the goal of the author was to conceal the information in the first place. If it was so, there is no reason to presume that the author was trying to preserve the original phonetics rather than obfuscate them, and essentially we have a ciphertext hypothesis with a foreign plaintext. Then we have the very same problems as with the other ciphertext solutions, it's unlikely to be a simple substitution or any one-to-one cipher due to implausible statistics for repeated word combinations, and one-to-many (for example, homophonic) ciphers are fairly hard to break. Adding on top of this the possibility of an old lost version of the original language and an old lost version of the original text, we are in the realms of ciphers nearly impossible to solve. So, after many suppositions and assumptions we probably come to a dead end, same as with many competing theories. What's the benefit of this approach?