[ExI] internet privacy

[BillK]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 3:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> I am not convinced.  A completely new language, not akin to Indo European or
> anything else, is just a jumble of meaningless letters without a key.
>
> How could you figure out the context?  It could be a car manual or poems on
> death for all you know.   bill w
>
>

It depends on how much other information you have and how many samples
of the language you have. If you found the document under a broken
down car, covered in oily fingerprints, then you might guess it had
something to do with car repair.  :)

Philology is the study of dead languages. A subset is Decipherment -
the translation of dead languages.

Quote:
Decipherment is the analysis of documents written in ancient
languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language
has been lost.
It is closely related to cryptanalysis - the difference being that the
original document was not deliberately written to be difficult to
decipher.

Examples of document decipherment:

Cuneiform (script)Cuneiform writing
Harappan writing
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing
Indus script
Linear A
Linear B
Maya writing
Olmec writing
--------

It is not a trivial task, of course. These people are experts in their field.


BillK