Re: 2 Things: One Interesting, One Not

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On Monday 25 February 2002 03:03 pm, Bryan Maloney wrote:
> >Matthew Kehrt <matrix14@...> wrote:
> >another hoax or what?
>
> There are a lot of theories on that manuscript.  Some I've seen on
> this mailing list were (unless I saw them elsewhere):
>
> It's a degenerate/redundant cypher.
> It's an attempt at writing Chinese alphabetically.
> It's total balderdash.
> It's a degenerate cypher mixed with total balderdash.
        You forgot to mention the one that I like, for obvious reasons: it's an
early example of a conlang! Of course, there's no more proof of this than for
any other theory, but I believe that it has been established that the
language is not Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, or any other Euro-lang. It
might be the case that it is one of the above languages encoded.
        As for the "balderdash" hypothesis, it would have to be very careful
balderdash, as a guy by the name of William Ralph Bennet ran several computer
studies on the manuscript, revealing that the letters show signs of not being
placed randomly, that different letters have different frequencies of
occurence, and that some combinations of letters are found in
greater-than-chance frequencies. Furthermore, it has low entropy (simpler
form), making it resemble a Polynesian language, which brings us to the
cypher bit: since European languages show higher degrees of entropy (more
complex forms), if it is a cypher of a European language, then the scheme
must be quite complicated. Alternatively, it could be like Japanese and
borrowed words, where the borrowed word is stretched, prodded, and violated
in obscene ways to fit Japanese phonetics until it barely resembles the
original word.
        Hmm...Japanese. I wonder if anyone has tried that...after all, Francis
Xavier(?) was in Japan during the 16th century...

<Snip very interesting description of "niium">

> None of the above theories are my own.
        So, what _is_ your opinion?
        :Peter
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