I had always just believed it was because they were isolated, but I’d been thinking about it lately and that just doesn’t hold up. Can someone familiar with code breaking and encryption help me understand why they were nearly impossible to understand, while almost every other cipher was eventually cracked? Thank you!
In: Mathematics
Cyphers that just substitute letters in the same language still have all the quirks of that language. In English, for example, the most common letter is most likely to be E, there are only certain letters that occur as doubles, there are common prefixes and suffixes you can look for, only two letters are used as complete words… and so on. You can use these recognizable patterns to solve the cypher without a key. You can verify your solution because it will conform to rules of grammar that you know: i.e., if you end up with “HELLO MY NAME IS BILL” your solution is probably correct, whereas if you end up with “DEFTRIUN GLUTYJHN SFEWYBVD” it’s almost certainly not.
Deciphering an unknown foreign language is a completely different affair. It’s not just understanding the vocabulary (and possibly alphabet), but also knowing what to expect for the sentence structure, verb conjugations, and so on. That’s nearly impossible to do without someone familiar with both languages (there are ancient languages that we have many samples of but can’t decipher for this same reason).
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