Just to let you know that, following the malware attack that Cipher Mysteries recently suffered, I’ve now moved the entire blog over to a completely new server. Of course, though this should have been straightforward, in practice these things always take days more than they should. Oh well!
To tell which of the two versions you’re looking at, I’ve tweaked the colour of the top picture from blue to green – so if it’s blue, you’re looking at an old (cached) version. Green good, blue bad. 😉
Doubtless the malware warning will linger in places for a few more days, but thankfully Google itself has already dropped the malware warning: by the weekend everything should be just about back to normal. Sorry for the disruption to your surfing, this was due to events beyond my control, yada yada yada. *sigh*
Dear Nick, reading your blurb weekly is so much more convenient than trying to make sense of the outpouring at the other site.
At a class reunion, I met a gal who worked in cryptology for years. My intention is to go through Kahn or some other author and compare what looks like a cypher to the known attributes of Nahuatl (reduplication, word final devoicing, etc) and of the Voynich (multiple homophonous letters as r = l, c = s, g = c, etc.) to what to a crytographer looks like encryption. I am guessing (hypothesizing in British) that much of what the cryptologists are attempting to unravel is business as usual in the specific natural language Nahuatl. My plan was to use Kahn as a template and respond to his asertions that VMS is code with examples from Nahuatl, problably from Lochart, “Nahuatl as written”, or De Molina. Anyone who would like to follow along would do well to purchase a copy of Kartunnen.
errata: for Lochart read James Lockhart
for asertions read assertions
for Kartunnen read Frances Karttunen
Hi Jim,
Pulling Kahn’s book down from the shelf, he actually makes observations rather than assertions:
* “The work is too well organized, too extensive, too homogeneous” [to be a hoax]
* “Nothing repeats larger than a group of five words”
* “The words in the text recur, but in different combinations, just as in ordinary writing”
To my eyes, the most direct problem with Nahuatl-as-Voynichese is the presence in the text of (what seem exactly like) medieval page-references (air, aiv, aiir, aiiv, aiiir, aiiiv, aiiiir, aiiiiv), even though these were already long archaic by 1519, the earliest date for Nahuatl in Europe. But as Kahn is silent on this kind of thing, he probably doesn’t present much of a cryptological opponent in this respect. 😮
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
Hi Nick! “Four legs good, two legs bad?” eh? Good to see you on an uninfected server.
Cheers,
Dennis