You’re assuming a static system.
Four points on this:
1. What if the cipher evolved as it was being written? According to my model, that’s entirely possible, because during the encryption process, the cipher might have revealed that certain sections didn’t fit together. This was gradually “perfected.” Actually, that's exactly what you'd expect from a 200-page book by Chiffre...
2. If we assume that it’s a homophone cipher with free choice, we know that people develop habits simply based on what they prefer to write, and so a homophone cipher can shift those habits.
Regarding “m”—example: Imagine someone has been writing letters for months. At the end of a line, according to the rules, they may either write out “und” or use the abbreviation like “&”—both are allowed and have equal value. At first, they almost always write out “und,” but over some month, he increasingly use “&.”
3. The theory of humors was the organizing principle of 15th-century medicine. Herbal texts of the time classified plants according to warm/cold/moist/dry). An author writing such a work works his way through an ordered scale. And an ordered scale in the content produces, on the surface, exactly what your cosine-similarity curve shows: not a thematic block with a hard boundary, but smooth transitions. The “continuous gradient without a discontinuity” would then not be an evolving system, but simply a table of contents arranged from cold to warm or something similar.
4. Spelling Variations in Authentic Manuscripts:
Spelling in medieval texts is not uniform (I call this ‘spelling anarchy’). The same word can appear in several variants within a single manuscript (the best-known example being the German ‘und’: “und, un, unde, unnd,” etc.), and the preferred form often changes over the course of longer works. I have examined this using the “Breslauer Arzneibuch” and the “Admont Bartholomew Codex”: In the Admont Codex, for example, the “si/sy” pair gradually shifts from about 60% “si” at the beginning to about 10% at the end. Other pairs change abruptly, with several pairs changing at the same points in the text—which suggests a change in scribe or source text rather than a matter of habit; and that, too, could apply to the VMS.
However, I cannot completely rule out transcription effects in the editions I have used. Just a note.
But the fundamental phenomenon is beyond doubt, and I have observed it myself in shorter manuscripts: The surface spelling shifts, gradually or abruptly, while the underlying language remains perfectly stable German.
So if a gradual superficial change were evidence against a stable system, this criterion would classify authentic 15th-century German manuscripts as lacking a system. (Just kidding
)
If you take all four of these factors together, the observed evolution could just as easily arise naturally.
Four points on this:
1. What if the cipher evolved as it was being written? According to my model, that’s entirely possible, because during the encryption process, the cipher might have revealed that certain sections didn’t fit together. This was gradually “perfected.” Actually, that's exactly what you'd expect from a 200-page book by Chiffre...
2. If we assume that it’s a homophone cipher with free choice, we know that people develop habits simply based on what they prefer to write, and so a homophone cipher can shift those habits.
Regarding “m”—example: Imagine someone has been writing letters for months. At the end of a line, according to the rules, they may either write out “und” or use the abbreviation like “&”—both are allowed and have equal value. At first, they almost always write out “und,” but over some month, he increasingly use “&.”
3. The theory of humors was the organizing principle of 15th-century medicine. Herbal texts of the time classified plants according to warm/cold/moist/dry). An author writing such a work works his way through an ordered scale. And an ordered scale in the content produces, on the surface, exactly what your cosine-similarity curve shows: not a thematic block with a hard boundary, but smooth transitions. The “continuous gradient without a discontinuity” would then not be an evolving system, but simply a table of contents arranged from cold to warm or something similar.
4. Spelling Variations in Authentic Manuscripts:
Spelling in medieval texts is not uniform (I call this ‘spelling anarchy’). The same word can appear in several variants within a single manuscript (the best-known example being the German ‘und’: “und, un, unde, unnd,” etc.), and the preferred form often changes over the course of longer works. I have examined this using the “Breslauer Arzneibuch” and the “Admont Bartholomew Codex”: In the Admont Codex, for example, the “si/sy” pair gradually shifts from about 60% “si” at the beginning to about 10% at the end. Other pairs change abruptly, with several pairs changing at the same points in the text—which suggests a change in scribe or source text rather than a matter of habit; and that, too, could apply to the VMS.
However, I cannot completely rule out transcription effects in the editions I have used. Just a note.
But the fundamental phenomenon is beyond doubt, and I have observed it myself in shorter manuscripts: The surface spelling shifts, gradually or abruptly, while the underlying language remains perfectly stable German.
So if a gradual superficial change were evidence against a stable system, this criterion would classify authentic 15th-century German manuscripts as lacking a system. (Just kidding
)If you take all four of these factors together, the observed evolution could just as easily arise naturally.