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200-Year-Old Cipher Finally Cracked
Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."
The message says:
"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."
A code expert just cracked a code
The article says "After unlocking its hidden message in 2007". This is hardly 'just'. The solution was more recently published though. Interesting article.
But it still has lots of patterns that every language known has. Anyone can take a bunch of scribblings down and make it "seem" like a language, but the Voynich manuscript is unique that every part of it seems to be a language, not the work of someone insane.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I quite agree. And Japanese isn't even the worst. There is a writing style where you alternatively write right-to-left then left-to-right. The dead language of Easter Island, Rongo-Rongo, goes one worse and even requires you to turn the page upside-down on alternate lines. (That's the ONLY thing anyone can understand of it.)
The Wikipedia article states that some words are repeated three times, which strongly suggests that words can be modified not only by other words but by groups of other words. Quite a number of languages also have special symbols (determinants) which can completely alter the meaning of the word they're associated with.
Others liberally mix alphabetic, syllabic and iconographic symbols - modern English is a good example of a language that does this. In some languages, the same character can be used in any or all of these forms, depending on the characters around them.
I suspect you are correct in your conclusion that it was some (alas failed) attempt to preserve a dead language, which may also include my idea that such a language was being used as a secret language but is not restricted to that theory.
It would be interesting to know which language it was, and where, but I'm not sure we'll ever get beyond the (fairly wide-ranging) language family already guessed at.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The only reason it's not been solved until now is because no serious cryptanalyst was working on it. As soon as I read the description of how it's done, I knew it would be highly vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. (The guy who cracked it used frequency analysis of letter pairs, because there was no known plaintext available. But if someone were using the cipher on a regular basis, there would be.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The DNA evidence for this claim is inconclusive because it does not eliminate other members of Jefferson's family. In particular, one close relative had a poor reputation, and is a likely candidate for this misbehaviour.
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