Cryptography cracks code from 18th Century

GWC Community Off-Topic/Other
#1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25code.html?ref=science

Click the Found in Translation link. It’s pretty amazing the way they went about decipher the text.

So, the latin letters are actually spaces put there to throw people off. Probably pretty hard to figure that one out. Though I think people still made educated guesses before feeding it to the computer. When they finally cracked the code, the most important guess was their the text is probably written in German. So if it’s some code where no one speaks the language any more, I wonder if they will be able to decipher its meaning.

So… a secret society fascinated with eye surgery and ophthalmology eh? Wonder who were their patients.

#2

Interesting question. The Japanese weren’t able to crack the Navajo code in WWII, since they had zero familiarity with the language. OTOH, we’ve managed to decipher Mayan heiroglyphs, so… maybe?

#3

though the Mayan language has died, but there are native languages that are from the same family. also i assume there are records of the mayan language while it was still alive. one of the few benefits of Christian colonialism is that the missionaries tries to learn local languages in order to convert people, therefore some record of the native language usually survives.