These days, I’m thinking and animating about
messages that we cannot read.
Uncracked codes, if you will.
Apparently this topic’s in the air, what
with the release of the Imitation Game this
month.
That film’s about Alan Turing and cryptanalysis
of those German Enigma machines during WWII.
I said cryptanalysis and not cryptography,
a word you may know better.
Cryptography is about sending a message securely
by changing it, often changing it so it looks
meaningless.
This is obviously useful when there’s a
way for the receiver to change it back and
see the original message.
Cryptanalysis, on the other hand, works out
ways to understand and break those systems,
to understand how the message is being changed
by this system so that you, unintended recipient
with your prying eyes, can read the original
message.
But this is all my brother’s field.
I should grab him and you two can talk about
it sometime.
That’s all separate from decipherment, which
is an attempt to recover messages in an unknown
writing system.
Cryptanalysis works with texts that were meant
to elude you.
Decipherment works with messages that were
once plainly readable, but aren’t any more
thanks to accidents of history.
So, as you’ll see in next Friday’s video,
hidden codes often use characters we recognize
to hide a secret message, undeciphered scripts
have characters we can’t even read or identify
that stand between us and a not-so-secret
(or, not intentionally secret) message.
Of course, there is that pesky Voynich manuscript,
which may be both!
With all this in mind, you’ve got a bit
of background to appreciate next week’s
video.
I’d like to welcome all new subscribers,
you’re making it so much fun to talk about
language here.
Big smiles for all of you!
Let me know in the comments if you’re interested
in a short series that looks deeper at the
decipherment of ancient writing systems like
Egyptian and Mayan.
