davidjackson > 19-09-2019, 10:26 PM
Quote:The author may just have loved ciphers and wanted an excuse to write a book in cipher.
Mark Knowles > 19-09-2019, 10:36 PM
(19-09-2019, 10:25 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We know it's not a common European language in a simple code - luckily there is some consensus on this.
We also suspect that a very complex code is anachronistic.
So indeed, you could ask, why?
But all other options also raise questions. If it's nonsense, why on earth write so much? Q20 would have been entirely unnecessary.
Mark Knowles > 19-09-2019, 10:41 PM
(19-09-2019, 10:26 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:The author may just have loved ciphers and wanted an excuse to write a book in cipher.
That theory says nothing about our ability to decrypt it. What made this author special, that he could encrypt a book on a fashion that he could decrypt it but we couldn't?
(19-09-2019, 10:26 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:The author may just have loved ciphers and wanted an excuse to write a book in cipher.
That theory says nothing about our ability to decrypt it. What made this author special, that he could encrypt a book on a fashion that he could decrypt it but we couldn't?
-JKP- > 19-09-2019, 11:27 PM
Stephen Carlson > 19-09-2019, 11:30 PM
(19-09-2019, 09:37 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Simply question - why encrypt the VM?That's a great question. I suppose fundamentally that the reason to encrypt anything is to hide the plaintext from unauthorized readers. That's sounds like a truism, even tautological, but let's use it as a starting point.
...
So let's look at the mindset. Why would anyone encrypt a whole book? Because they thought it was full of personally important and confidential information? In which case, it would be the most important book from the era we have - because it would be unique. Nobody else from the era thought it important enough to encrypt their entire notebooks, let alone create an entirely new unbreakable encryption system.
-JKP- > 19-09-2019, 11:34 PM
Stephen Carlson > 19-09-2019, 11:45 PM
Koen G > 20-09-2019, 12:03 AM
(19-09-2019, 11:45 PM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would the VM be perceived (in the 15th cen.) as an encrypted text or an exotic language text?It depends who's doing the perceiving, I guess. An experienced reader in the 15th century would recognize most of the characters as common ligatures, abbreviations, numbers... So my guess is that they would think someone's been messing around rather than it being some genuine foreign script.
-JKP- > 20-09-2019, 12:08 AM
Anton > 20-09-2019, 12:12 AM