“C’est ne pas un mot”

Edit: I’ve just added a whole page dedicated to the “Face Value-Fallacy“, because I feel it’s important more people are aware of it.

One of the pitfalls of VM research is the presumption to take its text at face value — these letters that make up the text look so very much like latin letters (except… not quite ;-)), that it’s tempting to presume that each ciphertext letter indeed does represent one plaintext letter. And from that starting point the next logical step is to presume that each chipertext word corresponds to one plaintext word.

But upon closer inspection, this presumption is not borne out by observation, except by the fact that the letters are grouped into small sequences, seperated by visual spaces. A lot of features speak against this assumption or “words”,*) namely —

• The words of the VM show a high internal structure: Many letters appear only word-initial, some only word-terminal, and many show a high dependency on their neighborhood. While these features are not unheard of in natural languages — compare “q”, which is always followed by “u” in most western languages, or the German “ß”-s which has a strong tendency to appear word-terminal — no language exhibits so many of these features and such a strongly regulated word-internal grammar.
• The letters aren’t evenly distributed on the page. It’s common knowledge that the gallows characters are concentrated on the page tops and paragraph starts. While this could be explained by them being ornamental versions of regular characters, Julian Bunn’s analysis from 2016 shows a bunch of certain characters “crowd” in line-initial or line-terminal positions, which is a pretty odd feature, if one character really represents one plaintext letter.
• Unless we are very wrong about the character set used for the VM, one VM word simply doesn’t have enough information content to encipher a plaintext word.**)
• “Sentences” often differ by only slight changes from word to word or show word repetitions or show word repetitions, so that it almost looks like words are not independent but “morphing” one into the other, and the true information content doesn’t lie in the words themselves, but in the changes introduced between them.***) This is also difficult to reconcile with the idea that each VM word corresponds to a plaintext word.

No. There is much too much going on in the encipherment of the VM. A ciphertext word is not a plaintext word, and a ciphertext letter does not correspond to a plaintext letter, I’m willing to bet on both.

It’s still my convinction that the fiendishness of the VM encipherment doesn’t lie in it’s complexity, but in it’s seeming simplicity: Taken at face value, it looks like something dead simple to solve, and so even a moderately complicated scheme escapes the eye of the beholder. We’re missing the forest for the trees which look like shrubbery.

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*) Subsequently I’ll use the term “word” for “a short sequence of glyphs in the VM, seperated from the rest by visual breaks.

**) It could be that the VM character set is much more complicated than presumed and contains many more fine details which discriminate between different character, but I doubt this for reasons of practicability: The VM characters are already quite small, and it would have been impossible for the author to write down his letters so exactly on rough vellum that small nuances would have been legible for a reader. (Not to make too fine a point on this.)

***) Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the word sequence “walter winter” would be used in such a manner to encipher the word “in”?