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A simple substitution experiment

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• A simple substitution experiment

• A simple substitution experiment

  ReneZ > 3 hours ago

  As I was running some promising yet unsuccessful attempts to decode the Voynich MS text, I ran into the question: how difficult will it be to detect being 'close to' the solution? I decided to try something I had been thinking of on several occasions:
  
  Take a known plain text, and substitute vowels with other vowels and consonants with other consonants. Will the result be recognisable? To try this out, I took a part of Dante's Inferno, and changed the vowels and consonants from the Italian frequency distribution to the Latin frequency distribution. For these distributions, I used the ones obtained empirically on this page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  for the Dante and Mattioli source texts. Following is the conversion table:
  
  

  Code:

  E A I O U   N R L T S C D M P V G H F B Q Z X J K 
i e a u o   t s r n m c l d p q b v f g h x y z k

    
  Note that the Italian text had two fewer consonants than the Latin text, so I added J and K to make them equal.
  Surprisingly, even though Italian and Latin are closely related, the conversion completely mixes up both vowels and consonants.
  The two questions I had were:
  - would the text be somehow recognisable?
  - would the text show any indication of being meaningful?
  
  The first is a definite no. The second is a bit more subjective, but I would also argue that it is: 'rather not'.
  As the text is a fully grammatical known text with only simple substitution applied, and it largely follows a reasonable single character frequency distribution, this means that 'just looking' isn't sufficient to decide whether one is close to a solution or not. 
  A proper simple substitution solver (tool) should be used to test the result.
  Here follows a moderatly short part of the resulting text. If anyone wants a longer sample to play with, let me know.
  
  

  Quote:tir dixxu lir ceddat la tumnse qane
  da sansuqea pis ote mirqe umcose
  cvi re lasanne qae ise mdessane
  eva hoetnu e las hoer ise i cume lose
  imne mirqe mirqebbae i empse i fusni
  cvi tir pitmais satuqe re peose
  netn i edese cvi pucu i pao dusni
  de pis nsennes lir git cv a qa nsuqea
  lasu li r ernsi cumi cv a q vu mcusni
  au tut mu git salas cud a q atnsea
  netn ise pait la muttu e hoir potnu
  cvi re qiseci qae eggetlutea
  de pua cv a foa er pai l ot curri baotnu
  re luqi nisdateqe hoirre qerri
  cvi d eqie la peose ar cus cudpotnu
  boeslea at ernu i qala ri moi mperri
  qimnani bae li sebba lir paetine
  cvi dite lsannu ernsoa pis ubti cerri
  errus fo re peose ot pucu hoine
  cvi tir rebu lir cus d ise losene
  re tunni cv a pemmea cut netne paine
  i cudi hoia cvi cut rite effettene

• RE: A simple substitution experiment

  Jorge_Stolfi > 30 minutes ago

  Well, the rhythm and rhyme are still OK... 

• RE: A simple substitution experiment

  tavie > 3 minutes ago

  Beautiful. Have you considered it might be Proto Romance?
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