![[0500] The Book Of Woo](/comics/2013-07-29-0500-the-book-of-woo.jpg "[0500] The Book Of Woo")
Have you ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? It’s a mysterious book, possibly created in the early 15th century, that contains weird illustrations and text written in an unknown script and language. Since its rediscovery in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich, it has eluded the decipherment attempts of generations of cryptographers. The Voynich manuscript is a fascinating piece of history that has inspired many novels, games and films. Amateur cryptographers can find the latest news and research on the Voynich manuscript and other uncracked ciphers on Nick Pelling’s blog Cipher Mysteries. He’s also the author of the readable non-fiction book The Curse of the Voynich.
To celebrate the publication of the 500th Sandra and Woo strip, I have decided to publish “my own Voynich manuscript”. So here it is, The Book of Woo! As you can see, it resembles the Voynich manuscript in several ways. But of course we couldn’t create 240 pages, 4 had to be enough. Unlike the Voynich manuscript, The Book of Woo definitely contains sensible information that can be deciphered. I guarantee it ;-). And I will pay the person who is able to provide a decipherment that’s sufficiently close to the plain text a reward of $500. Send your decipherment attempt(s) to novil@gmx.de. I would also love to hear about your general ideas or statistical analyses that you carried out. There is no deadline. I will not publish the solution until at least strip #1000.
But be warned: It’s a huge challenge and I don’t expect to receive a valid decipherment at all. It’s primarily a work of art, not a puzzle for the general public. I believe that only experienced and dedicated code breakers have the chance to succeed. A lot of time was spent on the encryption. If you think you can simply carry out a frequency analysis on the letters and be able to reconstruct the English or German plain text this way, well, that’s just a waste of time. However, to make things a little easier, I want to give you the following hints:
- The encryption isn’t based on an algorithm only suitable for computers which executes a loop 100 times or something like that.
- The encryption isn’t based on some sort of device or mechanism that is hard to get.
- No “classical” steganographic method was used since that would just be impossibly hard to crack.
- The plain text is some sort of literature, as one can guess from Woo’s comment and the illustrations. A lot of time went into the plain text as well, it’s not just a copy of the first page of Rascal or something like that.
You can download larger versions of the four pages of the Book of Woo here:
[Update: 10 August 2013] Everybody who is seriously interested in deciphering The Book of Woo should read the comment section. There is a lot of interesting information in it.
[Update: 31 March 2015] The Book of Woo Wiki, now maintained by our reader Chris, also contains valuabable information for anyone who’s trying to break the code. In case the wiki should go offline sometime in the future, I created a complete backup of the wiki’s content on 31 March 2015.
In other news, the winners of the Sandra and Woo and Gaia fanart contest 2013 have been posted.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
- Sandra: Hey, Woo, what are you writing?
- Woo: Oh, just a little story.
- Sandra: Really? Can I have a look?
- Woo: Sure, I’ve just finished it.
- Sandra: What in Voynich’s name…?!
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@ Satsuoni:
I still have no idea how to deal with ” AA ” and ” AA.” etc.
I haven’t given up yet, but I have few ideas and little time.
Perhaps the best strategy at the moment is to get other people interested in solving it. Tweet it, blog it, post it, spam your family and friends.
I’m finally back! Moved into college, workload stabilized, and things unpacked. I’ve been working for the past few hours and have made some promising progress with grammatical analysis. I want something tangible before I say anything though; it’s still just a network of guesses.
As to the lack of commas, I attribute it to Woo himself. Think about it: he’s writing a story composed primarily of declarative sentences, and he rarely writes. It would make sense for the story to be written almost at a 4th or 5th grade reading level; short words, simple structure, no contractions. Even when talking, he rarely uses large words (>6-7 letters), preferring simpler language. This would mean that the wordlength statistic should go down, considerably.
I’ve noticed that suffixes on words tend to be as few as 3 and as many as 5 letters long. This would indicate that something is happening to expand the length of word endings. I’ve started experimenting with the idea that the characters which switch alphabets are also spaces (m and z, I believe – I use the actual symbols so I don’t know the substitute alphabet you’ve been using).
@ Phlosioneer:
And on a similar note, I may be able to get some on-campus cryptologists and students to help.
@ Phlosioneer:
I doubt we should view it as Woo actually writing it… after all, this is an encryption, not another language.
@ Charles:
While that is true, also consider that this is a story that’s supposed to be written by him, presumably about his mythology. Novil probably wrote it from his point of view, so we can expect in-character text.
Made the cardinal mistake of clicking on the link to this again, and I wasn’t bluffing in my response to the “posters” thread, I can’t really stick any time into reading through that huge amount of well considered discussion right now.
All I wanna ask / contribute is … did anyone posit the notion of letters being rotated -within words- yet? I know it might be a bit of an obvious one, but I don’t remember it coming up. And it seems like it might have been used in some of the shorts… or at least, the ciphers used for them make it look like that.
If you don’t get what I mean, think “pig latin”. Or if you were to implement one rotating one letter per word, the first sentence of this line would come out “Fi uyo tdo’n tge twha I nmea, kthin “gpi nlati””. Quite effective at disguising your actual text before a further ciphering stage, as the words no longer look like anything intellible when taken out of context. And it might be quite easy to, e.g., assume that “g”s are actually “h”es if you decipher “t” and “e” first…
Yay, people 🙂
@ Phlosioneer:
Can you tell what you think about sentence snippets:
sbinzr/mzs= >n #=in ibrnz>n
r/mzs=z>n #=in ibrnz>n
from the grammar point of view? As you can see, they are nearly identical, but one misses “z” between “s=” and “>n” (and has z before “r/m”). Maybe that could be the clue to “z” function.
@ tahrey:
Well, not in that words. One person mentioned “gibberish” on the first page, and pig latin is essentially permutation+null cipher. I know I have considered permutation (like moving letters around, writing sentences backwards, etc), but given that we are still not sure what constitutes a “letter” it is not of much help, and it doesn’t explain near-perfect syllabic structure, unless the cipher letters were arranged like that (which still doesn’t explain the dearth of consonants…) It might well be one of the layers, though. (Novil said “several”… I wonder how many)
And of course, one thing to remember is that the first layer was of the type not mentioned in any “classical ciphers”, aka alphabet switching. For normal ciphers, it doesn’t offer any security whatsoever, but when one doesn’t know the method it is quite confusing. It is possible that other layers are like the first one, too… Something really simple that is easily missed.
@ Satsuoni:
I stand by my (at least partial) decryption of the second layer.
It turns it into “words” with far fewer “letters”, increases the alphabet to around 50, and has some strange characteristics that I’ve yet to understand.
@ Satsuoni:
I’ve been looking at that. Grammatically, it makes little sense; #=in has some value elsewhere as a possible noun, but that particular structure baffles me. I’ve hung up the grammatical analysis for now, until I can figure out what constitutes a letter; I’ve learned all I can from word order & positioning. I’ve identified 4 characters (2 from each alphabet) that are definitely not letters, and another 2 that might belong to the same group. They may be nulls, or do something else wacky, but they’re clearly interchangeable for whatever reason. My theories currently include a second, more subtle switch to the alphabet, digraph indicators, or nulls. There are rules behind their placement, because they appear consistently, though which one is used varies. I’ll publish the characters I’m talking about if I haven’t made any progress by wednesday.
@ Phlosioneer:
Hmm 🙂 Can’t say I can see that, so I guess I’ll wait until wednesday.
Significant? I’m not sure. But if you’ll recall that the row width with greatest index of coincidence was 5, I’ve found out something else. I’ve been writing Perl scripts to analyze the text in various ways, and I’ve written one to find recurring patterns of characters and wildcards, seeing if I can spot a recurring pattern in which the characters involved aren’t necessarily right next to one another. Here’s what I’ve found (searching for patterns with lengths up to 8).
The most frequently-occurring pattern is ‘n ‘ — that is, the ‘n’ glyph followed by a space, or what appears to be an ‘n’ at the end of a word. That occurs 150 times.
Second is ‘z’ followed by two of anything and then a space, occurring 131 times. Unsurprising, since there are a lot of ‘words’ like that.
Third is ‘rn’, occurring 130 times.
Fourth is ‘r’ followed by one of anything and then a space. 117 times.
Here’s the result I find interesting. A space followed by four of anything and then another space occurs 112 times. That’s a pattern of length 5: four characters, space, four more characters, space … The entire text doesn’t follow that pattern, but what if there’s a base pattern like that, and then there are characters that vary that pattern? I’ll have to look carefully at this. But remember the number ‘10000’ on page three? It’s a five-character pattern, a one and four zeros. That has to mean something.
Note: This is with punctuation marks ignored. If they are left in, the row width with highest index of coincidence remains 5, however, and this analysis shuffles things around a bit:
1. ‘rn’ with 130
(tie) ‘n ‘ with 130
3. ‘z?? ‘ with 125
4. ‘z?n’ with 112
5. ‘r? ‘ with 99
6. ‘ ???? ‘ with 93
Also, if Satsuoni is correct and ‘z’ is taken to be some sort of space, and we sum up the ‘ ???? ‘ results with ‘z???? ‘, ‘ ????z’, and ‘z????z’, this pattern of space/z followed by four of anything and then another space/z easily becomes the most common pattern in the text.
@ Thomas J. Lee:
Well, most of the words (especially if you consider z to be a spacelike existence) are about 4 letters (two pairs) in length – there are maybe 3-4 distinct words that have 6 and maybe 1 or two (i didn’t count, sorry) that are 7 (#v>v#vm). With z being spaced, there are also many 2-letter, and 3-letter(ending with m) words. z only has more than one pair (or pair+m) after it (until space or next z) if it follows a single “vowel” (5-group) in the beginning of the word (i.e. if it is second in the word). In all cases but one that “vowel” is “v”, a single exception: /z=r=i=. Also, “v” in the first place is only followed by “z” or space, and with space only once, constituting a single case of single-letter word if we ignore “&”.
Hm, I think I’ll just dump patterns that I have noticed… XD
#/m is always followed by ivhn, but not vise versa (there are more of ivhn).
All instances of “#=in” are preceded by “s=” and “>n” (either “s=z>n” or “s= >n”) somewhere in the sentence – in all cases but first immediately preceded. – and followed by “ibrn”.
“rn” is almost always used as the last “syllable” in the word. The only exceptions are “>nrnm” , “/rnm” (where it is augmented by m) and “rnrn”.
The last page of the script appears to have a large amount of new “syllables” that are only used during this last stretch, suggesting possible different language, though the large amount of similar “words” seems to argue against it.
All occurrences of “zinm” are in the end of the sentence.
And in general, the text is very sparse, with large repeated sequences and many glyph pairs only in certain combinations/words, so I wonder how much of the original text there is… For now, I treat sentences as sentences, though that might change. Another switch as the first layer may reduce each word to a letter XD.
And I don’t know what anything of the above means 🙁
The answer is here: 😉
http://xkcd.com/593/
I think the script is using a “doubling” letter, like instead of “raccoon” it would be rac?o?n.
Ok, so I’ve made some decent amount of progress, but nothing thoroughly concrete, so I’m going to post what I’ve found. There are a few parts to this theory, and there are still a few kinks to work out.
Before I begin, I have to say that I’m thoroughly confused about how we’re mapping characters from the text to ASCII. In this post, I’ll be using the alphabet posted in the first page of the comments (Link: http://www.ballwithhat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/abc.jpg). On to the theory.
Firstly, the letters n/j and =/d are equivalent. They perform the same function: they indicate a digraph. The digraph is formed by combining a letter with one of these characters. Now, this creates some strange patterns (like “AA” and “AABC” words), but I think this is because the specific meaning of a given digraph seems to be contextual. The result of using these as digraph characters is to dramatically reduce the average word length to about 2-3 meaningful characters, which is precisely where it should be.
Further, there is a character whose sole purpose is to switch between using n/j and =/d. This switch is the character w/z, which has been thrown around a bit in the discussions. The reasoning behind these conclusions is this: the digraph characters appear frequently in long streaks, and then suddenly stop. The streaks of one character almost never overlap with the presence of the other. Next, if you look at where these “streaks” switch from one symbol to another, 80% of the time there is a w/z nearby. Specifically, when a w/z appears, the digraph character either switches immediately or switches at the beginning of the next word.
There are still a few problems with this theory. Whether the switch is immediate or delayed seems to be random. There are some streaks where neither of the digraph characters are used. There are a handful of streaks where the w/z character is outright ignored. And there are issues concerning the frequency of the digraphs, as they don’t line up very well. (I’m doing this all by hand, so frequency analysis is rather difficult – perhaps someone else can examine the respective curves in more detail.) However, a few things are constant. The same characters are used by the two digraphs (r being the biggest) and the presence of rather lengthy “streaks” of these patterns makes coincidence unlikely.
I personally think that this is one glimpse at a larger, state-based layer of encryption. I’ve been looking for patterns in the immediate vs delayed switches (v is looking rather suspicious on this point, but there’s not a big enough case for it yet), and patterns for when w/z is ignored.
If you think that the available alphabet is getting too small to fully hold 26 characters, think again. The combinatorial nature of digraphs allows for a range of possibilities conveniently centered around 25, 26.
Thoughts?
@ abowden:
The Voniche Manuscript is more real then you believe. The paper is made of pressed wood and leaves, unlike anything else on Earth. I believe it was written about 30,000 years ago, 20,000 years before the earliest records of man were written by Gilgamesh the King. His book is said to be the oldest in human life, though the Manuscript is supposedly much, much older. I do not believe it was even written by humans. Maybe extraterrestrials or the “gods”, but not a human.
I believe I know how to decipher the Book of Woo! I do not have a mirror so I cannot be sure, but I believe this is Latin backwards, or possibly Norse.
@ Phlosioneer:
I am not sure I agree – there seem to be too many deviations from the switching pattern – just look at the first sentence: “i/hvrn svrnzrn mnsn vzmn: i/hvrn svrnzrn c/#n” – about 3 ”z”, yet no switch.
They do seem to come in streaks, and that may be significant. Still, there are words that contain both without “z”, like “>nsvt=”. It is like me saying that the fact that several sentences contain as many z-suffixes as words without “z”, usually alternating, is somehow significant XD
Also, how did you single out “=” and “n” from the pseudovowels (“=n/bv”)? They all follow similar statistics, “=” and “n” are just the most frequent ones (I call them pseudovowels since there are 5 of them and their frequency resembles that of vowels in english/german text, though not precisely, and they end “syllables”, and you could map digraphs to subset of kana that way, with “m” becoming “n”)
@ Satsuoni:
I picked them out specifically because they were the most frequent, and therefore the easiest to do analysis on. I’ve noticed the other 3, but they don’t seem to follow the switching pattern. I’m going to keep chugging away at the w/z hypothesis until someone else can find a better idea; my intuition tells me they’re related.
@ Phlosioneer:
Well, there are 5 of them, so they probably can’t switch between each other. Anyway, good idea – I’ll try to track something else.
BTW, do you think my theory that “z” indicates some kind of permutation may account for some irregularities in your switching theory? As in,they switch but “z” messes up the order sometimes?
@ Phlosioneer:
What?
w and z are the same character. u and e are used to alternate which alphabet to use. This was confirmed a long time ago…
@ Charles:
I know. That’s why I’m pairing them; both alphabets are equivalent.
I would like someone to look up germanic 3-letter words that are palindromic. [eg. rar, not an actual word as far as I know] and possible germanic words that are four letters long that repeat the same 2 letters [eg. atat, again not a word etc.]. And be on the look out for words that could possibly stand for Seeoahtlahmakaskay. Or how about reading it backwards?
A question for Nevil, where doew Seeoahtlahmakaskay come from? The name, I mean.
Just another flyby … looking through the archive for quoteable quotes, I ran across this little gem… how many of us remembered that they’ve done something like this before, but on a smaller scale? There might be hints within it… especially the cipher used in the final bubble.
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2011/12/29/0338-a-challenging-comic/
(click forward to the next comic for the solutions and explanations)
Also, I do wonder if, thanks to an early post, we’ve all ended up spelling the Raccoon Goddess’ name wrong… it’s given, at least around that time, as “See-o-ahtlah-ma-kas-kay”, which seems different from how it was written in this thread.
Oh and I wouldn’t be surprised if the text turns out to be Cloud’s love poem that he sent to Sandra 😀 … which hasn’t actually appeared in print in the comic apart from one or two excerpted phrases.
@ Lenn Hallard:
He’s already answered that question, apparently:
http://spring.me/novil/q/293177292765536444
Has anyone considered posibility that Russian alphabet might be involved? E.g. the text might be transcribed from original language (German or English) to Russian letters (this would mess up the statistics of word lengths as some Russian letters describe two sounds and two letters are silent) and then substitute Russian letters with pictogramms. Russian alphabet contains 33 letters, Manuscript of Woo – only 31, but it could be possible that Manuscript of Woo doesn’t contain Щ, Ы or maybe silent letters.
Also Georgian alphabet contains 33 letters, but I find it more plausible that author knows some Russian because of Germany’s complicated history.
@Novil From the creators of Okami…. XD But seriously….holy crap, this looks cool.
It’s been a while since anyone’s commented, so I don’t know who’s still reading these, but I’ll put it here anyway. I’m going into a CS Major, and I’m working in undergrad research on designing neural networks and pattern-learning software. At some point this semester, I’ll finish programming the learning + testing suite. I’m going to set it loose on this code, and it will *probably* get it without breaking much of a sweat (given sufficient knowledge of the English language, which is what I’m testing). Good luck to anyone who can break it before then.
Some people here are thinking way ahead of what I could ever manage, but others are just so terribly far behind that it saddens me. A cypher this complex is obviously not going to be solved by people who still cling to the idea that what they see must be what is actually before their eyes. They’re assuming that spaces actually divide things, and letters and words are discrete items. If I had to guess, I’d say the original text was broken down to a single, extremely long string of binary digits, run through several layers of complex encryption, then the resulting data was reconstructed into a new document. Of course, I have no idea how one could actually decipher such a code, but at least I know it can be done.
[…] “The Book of Woo, a comic inspired by the Voynich manuscript and showing strange illustrations next to a cipher text: http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2013/07/29/0500-the-book-of-woo/ The cryptology experts Nick Pelling and Klaus Schmeh discussed the comic in their blogs, but nobody was yet able to decrypt it. I have therefore decided to raise the prize money for its decryption to $300.” […]
Oh my, I wasted hours to read through all the comments… Can’t really help, though.
Some ideas I had, even if others already pointed at the same:
I once invented a script inspired by Tolkien’s elven runes, where vocals were optional (or just accents, like in Hebrew) and the whole spelling strictly phonetical (but not as exact as in IPA).
A transliteration of English in German spelling (or vice versa) might be involved.
And do you know “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut”? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish_Languish
In Nether German dialects like Dutch, you can use an “e” to prolong vocals instead of doubling, in German we still have “ie” for a long “i” (“ee” in English). I guess someone pointed already at a potential “double” sign.
And, similar to pig latin, I remember some “secret languages” from school where you switch syllables and insert particles (but the structure here doesn’t look like that).
I hope someone will solve the puzzle…
BTW The Book of Woo (artwork style and content) reminded me on the mythical intro of “Watership Down” (the movie). I wonder why nobody mentioned that before. Maybe nobody’s old enough to know that 😉
@ GhastmaskZombie:
We assume that what we see is what we get because we have been told to expect that. You should always be aware of base assumptions; not everything is maximum encryption.
Hi, first time post here. Kudos to Novil for this amazing challenge 🙂
I have been working on this cipher for about a week, rather independently from the rest of the crowd as there was far too much to read (as well as get my own brain cells to work). As a result, I am using a *completely* different transcription than this forum seems to have settled on, which I am not going to confuse you all with.
However, it does not really seem that anyone noticed an observation I have made, and I thought it would be fair if I shared it. Please forgive me if it’s lost somewhere among the hundreds of current posts. Has anyone considered how similar the words that do NOT repeat are? For example, among the so many 7-glyph words, there are many equals but perhaps even more “near misses” of Levenshtein distance of but one… that’s not quite how languages behave, is it? I’ll leave it at that now… 🙂
@ Vašek:
I had noticed that too; but I couldn’t get it to pan out to anything. My prefix/suffix/infix model didn’t work, my digraph model didn’t work, and I don’t have any other explanations for that kind of pattern. I hadn’t thought to use Levenshtein distance, though.
I noticed some attempts at the interpretation of the story told by the illustrations in the book. I originally wanted to focus on the cipher only but I can’t keep myself from thinking of that now, too.
To all who are into possibly using the illustrations as a hint, um, wouldn’t you say they make WAY more sense when “read” from bottom to top? The raccoons’ homeland is in flames as they seek help with an improper / false prophet, or perhaps they are commanded by the figure. It takes some time (10000 years?) to rebuild their society, moving from buildings to trees as well. At some point they become aware of their own goddess, or maybe unite their power and devotion to let her rise and gain strength. From then on, she protects them from all bad.
Hello, Just popping back in to offer a couple of things. I played around with this last August but haven’t done much since as it became somewhat overwhelming.
1) I don’t remember ever seeing this mentioned but I suspect the final manuscript will be in both German and English. There were a number of hints to that effect: Novil is bilingual and S&W is published in both languages; The stated rule “sufficiently close to the plain text ” implies a translation as translations are never exact.
2) I just ran across this article about another “Voynich” codex that was actually cracked. (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/all/) If nothing else it is a very interesting read and it just may give someone a crucial insight. Who knows, Kevin Knight, the specialist who cracked the code might even be interested in cracking the Book of Woo. (http://www.isi.edu/~knight/)
I found the above story about the cracking the Copiale Codex fascinating as well as its peek into the plethora of secret societies in the 1700’s. (The encoded text was German so it may have direct applicability to Book of Woo.) The Google dive last August into ancient alphabets and runes was also very interesting and educational. (I trust most of you have taken similar excursions.) I don’t know how much Novil used or was influenced by the ancients but there are lots of intriguing similarities.
Enjoy.
Addendum
Kevin Knight’s pages on the Copiale Cipher. Includes links to the original document, transliterations, translated text, other articles and to a formal presentation on the methodologies used. The formal paper should be useful as it describes various approaches – what worked and what didn’t – as well as ways of organizing partial results that facilitate insights to solutions and links to available open source clustering tools.
@ Vašek:
Hi! Your comment gave me some great insight into yet another plausible twist. I’m looking at the book of woo a bit differently then a lot of the other people attempting to decode, using my acquired knowledge of the more finite traits of the English language, and how the patterns I picked up on might hint towards underlying hints.
I’ve been recording my research, and here is the 8 minuet hypothesis I drew up after you commented: http://www.mediafire.com/?g9yd91q66ol86i9
Melkor849 wrote:
So you’ve written English as if it were Armenian, with a different alphabetic character for each phoneme. We should have done that a long time ago.
@ Anon:
The Salvation Army has the best reputation among the top five charitable organizations. When you donate to them at least you know that it’s going to actually people in need, unlike others whose CEOs make six-figure salaries, plus bonuses (Red Cross, United Way). After a natural (or man-made) disaster, they stick around for the duration instead of just doing two weeks of press conferences and some token charity and then pulling out (Red Cross).
@ Puppy:
Why, thanks for your recognition 🙂 The observations you make in your MP3 are most intriguing, too! I actually think that what you mention about the raccoon languages adds to the plausibility of the first part of your recording.
I haven’t had much time to put into the cipher lately but I can say I am still taking a different route, not using letter substitutions or word substitutions either. Hope that by exploring various approaches we will find ourselves closing in on another step soon.
Btw. the “š” in my name makes a “sh” sound 😉
Why are so many people even considering cryptography? Is there a history suggesting that the author would go out of his way to make it harder than the story could justify?
To avoid breaking out of the art, this has to be something that the raccoon could/would write. Idiosyncratic spelling is reasonable. (Does the raccoon normally talk with a recognizable accent, or fail to hear certain sound distinctions?) Even inconsistent spelling errors are reasonable, particularly for young writers.
But any method that requires a multi-pass encoding for every character is not reasonable; Woo didn’t seem to be going out of his way to hide or encrypt it.
Now for some more specific questions…
How confident are we about the word-spacing? I know German is famous for extremely long compound nouns; I’m not sure about raccoonish. Could the “z” character be a hyphen, or even just a grammatical marker? (Even English has suffixes like “-fully”, so the length doesn’t rule things out.)
Do we know anything about raccoonish grammar or spelling or even phonology? Or about the author’s level of interest? For example, assuming could the “m” indicate nasalization or velarization, or make the previous sound long? If so, then 8 consonants plus a modifier or two might be enough — particularly if raccoons have trouble producing/distinguishing certain sounds, and therefore don’t bother to write them differently. (Hawaiian seems like a pretty good model, based on what information we actually have about raccoonish.)
Is there some semantic explanation for the switch between the two alphabets? Several of the letters looked very sharp (like carved runes) and others looked very curly (like Indic alphabets), but it doesn’t look like the sharps are in one set and the curly in the other. The runs are long enough that I wouldn’t expect it to mark capitalization. Switches can occur mid-word, which is uncommon for cursive vs block letters, and makes no sense for call/response or indications of speaker (unless the word boundaries are wrong).
How formal is this writing likely to be? It is likely to be sound like sacred script, or like Goldilocks and Three Bears?
Well, I am nothing of an expert, but according to the images, this explains the raccoon goddess, Raccoon heaven and hell, life, and interactions with humans. The first page most likely explains who the raccoon goddess is or perhaps what her role is among other animals, rising above them in intelligence and guile, as represented by the other animals and tree to which she is climbing. The tree may also represent the forest showing the raccoon’s place among life. Then the next page explains the life of a raccoon and the goddess’ children or kits (I think), this being noted by the streaks of light or otherwise life being transferred into the other raccoon’s as well as the picture of tools, human hand, and raccoon which relates to evolution among man and raccoon. The next page may explain a difference between life and death, shadowed by the skeleton side being dark and miserable relating to hell, and the fleshed side representing hell by showing the lively forest and the world. The 10000 at the top may explain the amount of time this cycle has been through evolution or could even possibly explain the approximate number of casualties a year. While the first two pages seem to relate more to life or heaven, the last page reveals a turning point or perhaps even hell. The bird like people/person could represent humans, humans that think less of raccoon’s, that destroy and cause destruction, as represented by the fire and demolition burning down the forest and raccoon’s, and humans that experienced evolution faster than raccoon’s did. This is greatly supported by several things. For one, the humans/human looks like a bird, which relates to the first page when the raccoon goddess was climbing the humans could “fly” much faster and grow in intelligence and guile to a greater extent. It is also shown that the human has a chain/cuff in his hand whilst kneeling next to the raccoon’s, which could represent animal abuse, carelessness, or slavery. This could also explain hell of course. The same destruction and demolition, the bird creature could represent a devil or demon of some sort, and there is also a literal gate to hell. The chains, finger pointing, and giant demon bird spiting fire could show that the raccoon’s have no choice but to go to hell once dead and reunite with the others lost in death.Though that is all that I can say, and I did not actually translate it through the given language and only analyzed a fairly possible story through a few pictures. Hope I got somewhat close, and reply if you see another idea in between what I’ve written.
Looks to me like a mix between ancient runes and Hiragana/Katakana (Japanese written language) and possible some Kanji (Basic written language that makes up the bigger part of most Asian languages). I’m definitely recognizing several Japanese letters there <3
Also it very much reminds me of the scriptures they use in the TV series Stargate. X3
I had two initial thoughts, neither of which I’m confident in now. First, that the text screamed “checkerboard” wrt the structure of the ‘words’. Second, that I was reminded of abjad scripts, with a possible extremely tenuous link from German to Hebrew via Yiddish (that is, that vowels are stripped, and consonant characters may double as vowels in context – as a model in the mind of the creator I mean, not actual use of Hebrew or Yiddish). Not really convinced now.
A hunch that is lasting though is it’s probably significant that the (ON) script contains precisely half the characters of the extended German alphabet, and (OFF) script precisely half the English alphabet, and that a ‘natural occurrence’ (after perhaps the first encryption stage) such as doubled numbers, is the trigger for the script ‘flip-flop’ing. This isn’t satisfying though, since it means the separate alphabets are being mapped-onto after some amount of encryption, where I can’t see how the few extra characters could be incorporated (because whole sections of both scripts translate directly onto each other, with only minor changes).
It stinks of some kind of compression still, which I can’t fathom. Very frustrating. What I’m specially impressed by, or excited about, in this text is how characteristics of the Voynich manuscript itself seem to have been really neatly simulated. Like the weird ‘word’ lengths and structures, and the bizarre repeating elements. Really excellent work.
So, where are the other comments? They were coming nearly semi-daily, and then there’s a huge gap. Finals? Eh, whatever the reason, Happy Holidays! To all our cryptographers! Good Luck.
@ Ryan:
Doesn’t the german alphabet have 30 characters?
@ Ryan:
Having spent much of my past months deciphering secretive documents stolen from the Knights Templar, I have to say that, at least in some of the words, there may be a Cæsar cipher involved in that text as well. It could certainly seem to fit the structure. The trick, though, is figuring out the key. That is, to say, the degree of shift in the letters.
Of course, I could be very wrong, but I figured my tuppence might be of help.
*bump*
Still thinking about this. Well, less about it specifically, and more about ways to build an analyzer. How could you express all the possible cryptographical patterns, and their sub-patterns? How do you use that info to reverse the code? How do you know the result is right? Perplexing questions. No-one else here at college has been able to make heads or tails of it, beyond the double-alphabet thing. I’m still very suspicious of the number of repeat-sequences; there’s got to be *some* pattern behind the code that’s making those things appear.
Sigh. I’ll just return to my all-nighter of homework. I’ll crack this… eventually.
well, I guess this means we’re waiting at least until comic #1000
I do really hope you’ll post the key and the translation eventually, Novil. I really hate not knowing stuff.
Guys, can someone please crack the code? It REALLY looks like something interesting.
Just a note about Comic 1000, It’ll be roughly 8 years, 3 months, one week, or rather, July 10, 2022. Somewhere around there.
I would just like Novil to know,
I am a patient man.
I will learn the secret eventually.
Mr. Random wrote:
No, with around 100 new strips per year it will be around July 2018.