Anton > 17-08-2016, 02:56 PM
ReneZ > 17-08-2016, 04:01 PM
-JKP- > 17-08-2016, 09:51 PM
Anton > 17-08-2016, 09:54 PM
Quote:I would like to say that there is no statement of opinion below to which I cannot myself find plenty of contradiction.
Quote:My analysis, I believe, shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural order.
Quote:Languages simply do not behave in this way
Quote:If the single words attached to stars in the astronomical drawings, for instance, are really, as they appear to be, captions expressing the names or qualities of those stars, there can hardly be any form of transposition system involved.
Quote:It might be, for instance, that the manuscript is intended to demonstrate some very primitive universal language
Quote:the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language such as was developed in the form of a philosophical
classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later.
Quote:My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution
Koen G > 18-08-2016, 09:57 AM
Davidsch > 18-08-2016, 12:16 PM
nickpelling > 19-08-2016, 03:56 AM
Sam G > 19-08-2016, 05:55 AM
(19-08-2016, 03:56 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Blimey, if I had a dollar for each time someone takes a snidey pot-shot at me in online forums, I'd surely have been able to buy my own Flaming Cross of Goa by now, right? *sigh*It wasn't intended to be a potshot at you, and I'm sorry that I did not make that clearer. What I was objecting to was Rene's rather selective criteria for determining who is and who is not an authority in a given field.
(17-08-2016, 09:54 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:My analysis, I believe, shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural order.
This statement, in the first place, means that Tiltman believes it impossible that the text is a simple substitution cipher - an opinion which, I think, is not presently disputed by anyone.
But in the second place, this statement (just by way of definition of a simple substitution cipher) means that Tiltman believes it impossible that the text is a natural flow of a plain text in any language. He adds immediately:
Quote:Languages simply do not behave in this way
(17-08-2016, 09:54 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Tiltman concludes:It's clear that his primary point was that the substitution would have to act not on individual letters, but on whole words or parts of words. This is the "code book" or "artificial language" idea, and this is precisely what he goes on to describe following these remarks.
Quote:My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution
It is not clear whether Tiltman means a complex substitution cipher here or some other thing,
ReneZ > 19-08-2016, 07:38 AM
Quote:I am fully convinced that the conclusions from Friedman and Tiltman (that it's not a cipher) are not to be challenged.
The key point is, though, what they mean precisely with 'cipher'.
Nowadays, Nick Pelling is clearly in the 'cipher' camp. However, he may have a wider definition of cipher than what Friedman and Tiltman intended.
Quote: Wrote:But how do we possibly reconcile a 100% medieval Western European origin for the VMS with the fact that it is written in an otherwise unknown language?
Sam G > 19-08-2016, 10:47 AM
(19-08-2016, 07:38 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
if he strongly believes that there is a cipher at work, this must be according to a wider definition of cipher.
Quote:I don't know if the 'stroke encoding' method once proposed by Elmar Vogt would count as a cipher, for example.
If it were something like that, at the end people might even be arguing whether it was a cipher or not even when it is solved.