From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 14:17:05 EST
At 04:59 AM 11/10/2003, John Cowan wrote:
>I fear that all this talk of signifiers and signifieds (a very un-English
>construction, that "signifieds") misses the point of ciphers. A cipher
>of the relevant type (a "substitution cipher", technically) is a mapping
>of the usual symbols in a text or set of texts to other symbols WITH
>THE INTENT OF SECRECY. That is why Theban is a cipher, and so is the
>venerable "pig-pen", and Masonic Samaritan; but the ecclesiastical use
>of Samaritan is not, nor are
But you can't make a solid case for rejecting encoding of a cipher on the
basis of 'the intent of secrecy'. What about ciphers that are developed
without the intent of secrecy? Would you encode those? What about
non-cipher scripts developed with the intent of secrecy -- e.g. traditional
women's scripts, or initiate scripts for ceremonial languages -- would you
reject those?
Philippe's suggestion of displaying Tifinagh characters with Latin glyphs
is not with the intent of secrecy, but it is still employing Latin as a
cipher of Tifinagh. So I don't think I've missed the point of ciphers at
all: a cipher is a particular sign arrangement in which one set of
signifiers is substituted for another; the intent is irrelevant.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 10 2003 - 15:13:18 EST