From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 07:21:18 EST
On 10/11/2003 03:38, jon@hackcraft.net wrote:
>>At this point, I'm a bit puzzled about the circumstances in which an
>>alphabet is a cipher of another, and when it isn't. In an offlist
>>conversation, you, I, and others seemed to arrive at the consensus that
>>the Theban "magickal script" was a cipher of Latin. And many years ago,
>>you raised the question of whether Etruscan was a ciper of either Latin
>>or Greek (as we both know now, it isn't). I assumed that the criteria
>>were (1) the scripts can be used interchangeably to write a single
>>language, and (2) there is a one-to-one correspondence between their glyphs.
>>
>>
>
>That can be easily disproven as a definition of a cipher by creating a cipher
>which doesn't match those two criteria.
>
>
And by pointing to an example where these criteria are met but one
script is not a cipher of the other. See the example of Azerbaijani
which I just posted. The same may well be true of many languages written
in Hebrew script only by Jewish sub-communities, unless these are to be
treated as ciphers.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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