Pasigraphie

Debosnys claimed that his cipher was in common use in Europe, but so far I haven't found any evidence to support that. Many books were printed in 19th-century France on secret writing, but serious ciphers of that era tended to eschew mysterious symbols in favor of using letters, numbers and early cryptologic methods.

If Debosnys' account of his life before 1871 is true (and there is not yet any reason to believe that) then one possibility is that his cipher was in common use among criminal fraternities, secret societies or as an unofficial means of secret communication among the lower ranks of the military.

All of that is speculation until we find evidence.

But in the search for evidence of such a system is I have read or skimmed quite a number of 19th-century French books on various specialized systems of writing: Stenography, Okygraphy, Tachygraphy, "French Hieroglyphs", etc. Among these I have found a few books on Pasigraphie.

I'm not quite sure how to characterize Pasigraphie. It is probably most like a universal language, but one that was never intended to be spoken. The graphemes of Pasigraphie do not have any phonetic value, but can be treated as digits in a base-12 number system.

These symbols are used to build words, which really are addresses pointing to entries in a nomenclator:

The graphemes can then be joined together, so complex symbols can be built from the simpler elements:

[Edit] Apparently Pasilalie was the spoken form of Pasigraphie.

Debosnys Real Name Part IV: Jacob Pomries and his wife Elise

I found a much clearer image of the passenger manifest from the arrival of the Cimbria at New York on July 3, 1871, courtesy of FamilySearch.org, together with transcribed names. Meet Jacob and Elise Pomries:

I puzzled for a long time over the occupation listed here, and finally decided that it may read "Slate Maker". From Stone: An Illustrated Magazine, vol. 6 (Dec 1892 - May 1893):

Debosnys' Real Name, Part III: A much better lead

In his autobiography, Debosnys claimed that, after the Franco-Prussian war and the events of the Paris commune, he "returned to Paris and went to Havre de Grace where he embarked on board the Cimbria for New York in June. His wife, Mrs. Judith Debosnys, died in July...."

The Cimbria route went from Hamburg to Havre to New York, so this part of the story is plausible. It arrived in New York on July 3rd, 1871. At that time, a liner could take around 9 days to cross the Atlantic, which would make his arrival consistent with a June departure date from Havre.

Thanks to the wonder of the internet, I have the passenger manifest from the Cimbria. It records the arrival of people belonging to

• Germany (387)
• United States (56)
• Russia (6)
• Switzerland (28)
• Denmark (2)
• Holland (2)

Debosnys claimed to have come to America in 1863 to fight in the Civil War, so presumably (if he is on the manifest at all) he is listed as an American. He claimed to have been born May 16, 1836, so presumably we are looking for a man aged 35 years (or so). He came with his wife, so presumably we are looking for a man and woman who share the same name.

Here are all of the Americans on the manifest, with my notes on each:

German surname (Friedr Schultz); traveling alone

German surname (Georg Kessler); traveling alone

39-year-old woman (Caroline Fasel) traveling with a 15-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl

German surname (Franz and Maria Dorn), age 45

Fritz Austen, age 31

Jacob Pomries, age 35 traveling with a Elise, age 22.

William Burmeister, aged 49 traveling with Louise, age 30.

German family (Richd Schmitz, Anna, Albert) and teenager Richard Muth

50-year-old Maria Schwartz with 17-year-old Antonia

28-year-old Adolf Schwalle with Anne

Sam Kahn age 21

Joh Schling age 47

John Hansen, age 23

Catherine Haupt, age 42

Friedr Kesschl, age 49

Jacob Raible, age 44

C W Stock, age 31

Fried Baden, age 33

Gust Engler, age 27

Ferd V Knessebeck, age 42

Carl Spierling, age 26

Rich Raufft, age 46

A woman surnamed Bliss, age 27, with children Willy (4) and Elsa (2)

Ellen Quinn, age 24

Marg Hathaway, age 27

C. A. Guarriges, age 27

Simon Morris, age 38, with wife Minna (24) and children David (2) and Wanda (11 mo)

Leon Grun, age 36, with Adeline (24)

Leroy Sauer, age 43

Helena Rohmeyer, age 40

Heir Clauss, age 40

Georg Schmolzy, age 37

C Pless, age 28

Carl Roll, age 42

Herm Calvi, age 14

Lucy Young, age 22

Ph Preund, age 46, with Augusta (34)

Walthae Gutmaw, age 28

Out of all of these, one couple actually fits the profile well. The couple apparently named Jacob and Elisa, whose surname is frustratingly difficult to make out:

I'm going to see if I can get a clearer image of this page.

Debosnys Real Name, Part II

Here is another name to research: Delpech.

Apparently a citizen named Louis Delpech, prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône, formed one of several companies of francs-tireurs called Francs-Tireurs de la Mort. Here is a notice regarding the creation of that company from the Actes du Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, v II, p 173:

Delpech was made colonel and served under Bourbaki, just as Debosnys claimed to have done (La Campagne de l'Est et l'Armée de Bourbaki, p 101)

But Delpech was not Debosnys, since Delpech returned to civilian life after the war (working in the realm of rail transportation between France and Portugal) and died in 1896. The two men would have been only two years apart in age, though.

Debosnys' Real Name

Debosnys claimed to be living under a pseudonym. Resolving the question of his true name could help solve the cipher, because one of the passages ends with what looks like a signature line:

If this encodes his real name, and if we can determine what that name is, then this could provide us with a crib.

I've been reading and re-reading Debosnys' account of his life as presented in Farnsworth's Adirondack Enigma, looking for circumstances in which his real name would have become a matter of record. One puzzling item was a note that Debosnys wrote in the margin of his autobiography:

"Change of name in October [1870] and sent to the army of the Rhone, franc terror of the death under Bourbaky and associated with the franck terror"

My initial thought was that there had been a horrible incident ("the franc terror") that led him to change his name in order to dissociate himself from it.

But now I understand that he was claiming to be a franc-tireur, a volunteer in the French guerrilla forces that resisted the Prussian invasion during the Franco-Prussian war. I've skimmed the autobiographies of a couple of francs-tireurs, and I am fairly confident he sequence of events in his autobiography related to clashes with the Prussians is either drawn from or written in imitation of the rapport journalier of a captain of the francs-tireurs.

The francs-tireurs were generally named after their place of origin or their commander. Debosnys uses the expression "franc terror of the death", but I haven't found any reference to a formation of francs-tireurs by that name. Perhaps it was a nickname.

Debosnys claims to have "volunteered for the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 with 600 men from America", and the narrative suggests that he was their leader. This doesn't seem to have been an uncommon sequence of events, and reflects somewhat the experience of Le Comte de Foudras, the commandant of the francs-tireurs de la Sarthe, who came from Belgium, gathered 338 volunteers, and organized them into four companies under his own command.

A formation of 600 Americans ought to be mentioned somewhere. Luckily, there is someone named Antan who has written a blog post about the names of formations of francs-tireurs. Apparently there were 599 formations, so a review of the full list may be necessary (if I can find the publication where they are listed), but the following from the blog post are interesting:

ST 428 Francs-tireurs Franco – Américains, capitaine Rampon
ST 453 Enfants Perdus d’Amérique (Français), capitaine Laugran
ST 519 Enfants Perdus de l’Amérique du Nord, lieutenant Laugran
ST 553 Volontaires Franco – Américains (ou Légion Américaine), lieutenant Soula

This list gives us three names to research: Rampon, Laugran and Soula.

What is Debosnys' "Portuguese"?

I just bought Farnsworth's Adirondack Enigma, so I've had a chance to read a bit more about Debosnys.

One page in Adirondack Enigma shows samples of Debosnys' writing in Latin, Portuguese, French, English and Spanish. The Latin, French and English are good (though the Latin is just a quote from the Vulgate bible). I can't see enough of the Spanish to tell if it is good. The Portuguese is puzzling.

Here is that piece of text:

Comoderondas inacia bêco olondo inoto para
Imbiabo kotaronc molonk niarotan pérana

I've never studied Portuguese, but if I look at a page of Portuguese text I can usually make it out based on what I know of French and Spanish. Of this, however, I can make neither heads nor tails. Likewise, I have trouble with this text, which is not specifically identified as "Portuguese", but is not anything else that I would recognize:

inno calledaz

Ontro de palade mosa kaen faleï tonüe dhala pico indor kouniss plaira colrose, inbello monozy impiodo cara. ûntez noüméa, tintems oda formandore, artosa passat Otiva ...(remaining text not clear or cut off)

Some of the words can be found in a Portuguese dictionary, if it is big enough, but I can't find most of them, and many are phonologically and orthographically problematic. For example, the word-initial k- in kotaronc, kaen and kouniss would be unexpected in any Romance language, since that sound is normally represented by c before a and o. The cluster dh in dhala is odd as well. Likewise, not a single word is repeated, and there is only one monosyllabic word in the bunch.

It seems there are three possible interpretations here:

1. This is Portuguese, but Debosnys learned it only as a spoken language and writes it phonetically in a way that is difficult to decipher
2. This is another knowable language, such as a secret argot, a creole, or an obscure language
3. This is not a knowable language--either it is nonsense, or a twin language, or an invented language

Time may tell. Or not.

A possible theme for the Cipher Poem

The Greek text on the opposite side of the page from the cipher poem (as I mentioned) is largely the first part of an ode written by Thomas Moore as a preface to his translations from Anacreon. This part of the poem sets the stage for Wisdom to ask the poet why he spends his life the way he does.

Debosnys has altered the wording of the original, so the goddess asks the following question:

"τι, γερων, τεον βιον μεν / ω δε βια του γαληνην"

Classical Greek isn't a language I know well, so I have to kind of wing it here. The German translation on Klaus Schmeh's blog is problematic because they misread the word "τεον" as "νεον". But I believe the question the goddess asks in Debosnys' version is:

"Why, old one, do you employ your life in the violence of tranquility?"

The word βια apparently has a range of meanings including: force; act of violence; rape. The word γαληνη means stillness.

In Thomas Moore's original, the subsequent lines are the poet's response to the goddess. I have a feeling the cipher poem is Debosnys' answer to this question.

What the Debosnys Cipher Poem isn't

I've been testing the hypothesis that the Debosnys cipher poem (DCP) is written in French, fits (roughly) an alexandrine meter, and each symbol represents a syllable.

My hypothesis is failing my tests.

I hunted through Beaudelaire's alexandrines and looked at the ones with AABB rhyme schemes, to use for comparison. I divided lines from these poems into syllables using five different approaches. In no case did the result resemble the pattern of symbol frequencies in the DCP, even accounting for the possibility that some of the DCP symbols might be nulls. The two main problems are these:

1. High frequency symbols in the DCP occur more frequently than high-frequency syllables in French, even if the French text is spelled out phonetically.
2. There are significantly more repeated pairs of symbols in the DCP text than there are repeated pairs of syllables in a Beaudelaire poem.

One possibility is that Debosnys is a boring poet who uses the same words over and over again, while Beaudelaire is an interesting poet who uses a broader vocabulary.

But another possibility is that the language of the poem isn't French, but Greek or Latin.

The other side of the page containing the DCP has a poem in Greek, which Klaus Schmeh mentions in his blog post. A reader of his blog transcribed the Greek poem and translated it into German. I searched for the Greek text and found that it is taken largely from a poem written by Thomas Moore as a preface to his Odes of Anacreon, though Debosnys drops a few lines.

Debosnys

Thomas Moore

Maybe there is some significance to the dropped lines, maybe not. In any case, Debosnys' Greek poem leaves off part-way through the text of Thomas Moore's original ode, with 20-21 lines remaining.

This raises the possibility that the cipher poem encodes the last 20 lines of the ode by Thomas Moore. If it does, it doesn't look like a straightforward cipher. More generally, this raises the possibility that the cipher poem encodes something in Greek, or perhaps in Latin.

End-rhyme is not a common feature of classical Greek or Latin poetry, so if there really is end-rhyme then this is more likely a composition by Debosnys.

19th Century Sténographie Française

One of the things that is impressive about the Debosnys cipher, if it encodes syllables, is the efficiency with which it does so. Most of the rhyming syllables require only three pen strokes to write the syllable.

Thinking about this has led me to read a bunch of 19th century French manuals on stenography, to get an idea of how a 19th-century francophone might have thought about efficiently encoding language.

A wide variety of stenographic systems seems to have blossomed in 19th-century France. The goal of stenography (as reiterated in many of the manuals) was to enable the user to write at the speed of speech. To this end, a number of compression strategies are used, among which the following three are quite common:

1. Compression by writing phonetically. For example, instead of writing ph, write f.
2. Compression by removing vowels. For example, remove all vowels except the initial and final ones, and remove the final vowel if it is e muet. So instead of writing sténographie française, write stngrfi frnçs.
3. Compression through the use of efficient alphabets. In addition to the use of curves and straight lines, these systems use spatial strategies such as direction and size to load each stroke with additional information.

Strategy #3 above seems to lead to a similar appearance in all of the scripts--an appearance reminiscent of Tironian notes--that is not present in the Debosnys cipher. While Debosnys might have used some spatial strategies (such as orientation) to encode information, he appears to have been more concerned with obfuscation than with efficiency.

The Stolze system of stenography originated in Prussia, but was adapted to French. It is interesting because it uses a phonetic approach, breaks down words syllabically, and encodes each syllable as a separate symbol. Of particular interest is the way in which it divides syllables:

In this system, the "primary syllable" of a word is identified, and one graph represents everything from the onset to the coda of that syllable. Subsequent "secondary" syllables are broken at the nucleus of the syllable, and so they represent only the rhyme. (Prefixes are handled in an analogous way).

So, instead of me-tal, we have met-al. In poem written using the Stolze system, all of the rhymes could be written with the same symbol, just as in the Debosnys poem.

Feminine and Masculine Rhymes in Debosnys' Poem

I've been reading a lot of Beaudelaire's poetry over the last couple of days, in order to better understand the structure of French poetry. (I picked Beaudelaire because I think there is a fair chance that Debosnys might have been influenced by him.)

One of the fairly consistent features of French rhyme in Beaudelaire, as well as in Debosnys' plaintext poem, is the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. A feminine rhyme is a rhyme ending in the silent e. In Debosnys' plaintext poem, the feminine rhymes are: grâce / passe, blessure / dure, brave / nuage (!).

I think there is a high likelihood, if the cipher poem is in French, that it alternates masculine and feminine rhymes. Weak supporting evidence for this is the fact that the only repeating rhyme occurs on the odd-numbered couplets 1 and 9. Since that rhyme would either be masculine or feminine, it should occur only on either odd or even lines.

There is nothing obvious that indicates which lines are masculine and which are feminine. There are two odd rhymes that use symbols that are variations on ♀, and one even rhyme that uses a symbol that is a variation on♂, but that is far from conclusive.

Minor update on the Debosnys poem

I've done some reading on French poetry and some work on transcribing the Debosnys cipher texts, and found three things that are interesting.

1. Identical rhyme

Conventional French rhyme apparently often includes the onset of the syllable in the rhyme, so cœur rhymes with vainqueur, and sonores rhymes with Maures.

If the rhyme includes the onset of the syllable, then the rhyming symbols of the text could quite easily correspond to full syllables, rather than needing to be broken at the nucleus of the syllable.

Debosnys did not use this type of rhyme in his plaintext poem, but that is no guarantee that the cipher poem does not use it. It is also possible that the text of the cipher poem was not authored by him. For all we know, he may have enciphered a poem by some other author.

2. Irregular Meter

I initially thought Debosnys' plaintext French poem was in iambic pentameter, but that was only on the basis of the first four lines. When I counted syllables for the rest of the lines, I found a fair amount of variation. Some of the other lines have the 12 syllables of an alexandrine, but there is no strict rule, and the longest line has 14-15 syllables.

If the cipher poem was authored by him, then the variation in the number of symbols per line could correspond to a variation in the number of syllables.

3. At least two languages

I have transcribed the cipher poem and one block of text (appearing above a plaintext poem in French), and I think they use the same cipher to write two different languages. The symbol frequency and inventory are quite different. Apparently Debosnys was a bit of a polyglot, so I don't know which two languages these are.

First hypothesis for the Debosnys cipher

In my last post I noted that the last symbol on each line of the Debosnys poem seems to represent the whole rhyme and nothing but the rhyme. To me, this says three things:

1. The cipher is phonetic
2. Some symbols represent rhymes.
3. The onsets of syllables are either left out or encoded in some other way

The first thing I thought of when I saw this was a type of pseudo-language used in the English version of Hergé's book Tintin and the Picaros. (I wish I had a copy of the French original to compare, but alas, I don't).

The Picaros use a language with phrases like the following:

Goh'blimeh! wa'samma ta, li li li va? Lem eshohya!
Sum in'ksup wivit!

The words are accented English, spelled phonetically, and broken in unnatural places. The process of obfuscation could be described in three steps:

Plain Text: "Something's up with it"
Accented Phonetic: sumink's up wiv it
Broken: sum in' ks up wiv it
Re-merged: sum in'ksup wivit

One of the Debosnys pages shows a poem in French that is roughly in iambic pentameter, with an ABAB rhyme scheme. (This strikes me as the product of an English speaker who learned French as a second language, since iambic pentameter isn't common in modern French verse...though of course it was common on Old French.)

Suppose we take the first two lines of Debosnys' plaintext French poem, represent them phonetically, and break them up into groups representing the rhymes of each syllable combined with the onset of the next:

oh! mes amis je vous supplie en grâce
de bien vouloir un instant m'écouté

Step 1: Represent it phonetically. I'll do that using an 1880 phonetic dictionary:

ō mé-z-ămī jĕ vǒû süplī ĕñ grâs
dě bĭĕñ vǒûlwâr üǹ ăñstăñ m-ékŏûté

Step 2: Break at the onset of rhyme

|ō m|é-z-|ăm|ī j|ĕ v|ǒû s|üpl|ī |ĕñ gr|âs
d|ě b|ĭĕñ v|ǒûlw|âr |üǹ |ăñst|ăñ m-|ék|ŏût|é

Step 3: Merge

ōm éz ăm īj ĕv ǒûs üpl ī ĕñgr âs
d ěb ĭĕñv ǒûlw âr üǹ ăñst ăñm ék ŏût é

Suppose Debosnys encoded each group of this text as a separate symbol. For a line of iambic pentameter, the product of this type of process would normally have 10-11 symbols. The lines of the cipher poem have, on average, 15 symbols per line. If the cipher poem is in iambic pentameter, then presumably complex or uncommon groups (like ĕñgr, ǒûlw) could be represented as two symbols, for example:

ōm éz ăm īj ĕv ǒûs üp l ī ĕñ g r âs

d ěb ĭĕñ v ǒûl w âr üǹ ăñ s t ăñ m ék ŏût é

A shiny thing

I was looking for substitution ciphers to test my new tools on, and I discovered one I hadn't heard about, thanks to Nick Pelling's Cipher Foundation site: The Debosnys Cipher.

Among the Debosnys cipher pages (the images of which I got from Pelling's site) there are the following two, which are clearly a poem.

It is appears from looking at the text that these are rhyming couplets with a scheme of AA BB. Assuming this is a conventional European end-rhyme, the rhyme should consist minimally of the nucleus and coda of the last syllable of the word. Since the visual rhyme appears to be limited to the last grapheme of each line, that grapheme seems to represents the whole rhyme and only the rhyme.

Suppose each symbol represents either an onset or a rhyme. In that case, we would expect the rhyming symbols at the ends of the lines to be slightly more frequent in the second position on each line than random chance would allow, since the first symbol would presumably represent an onset, and the second a rhyme. Indeed, out of 20 lines, four have end-rhyme symbols in the second position (20%), compared to one in first position (5%) and one in second-to-last position (5%).

First pass at mapping one network onto another

I have written some code to map networks onto each other, to try to find the best match between the topologies of the two networks.

It could run for a very long time, depending on the size of the network. Using the top 20 words from chapters 81 and 87 of Moby Dick, and running it for 8.5 minutes, I get a fairly good initial set of matches:

The groups in this graph represent the matches established between words in the two chapters. For six words (the, for, and, of, was, with, this) I got exact matches. The remaining groups were incorrectly matched after running for 8.5 minutes.

Even data of this quality could be useful. Suppose you have a text that must be in a known language, but you don't know what language it is. You could try all of the likely languages and generate a set of possible matches between words in your text and words in the candidate languages.

How to match word cipher text against reference text

In my last post, I mentioned that I want to develop some strategies to attack word ciphers. The reason for this is that I think it would be generally useful for decipherments like the Rohonc text, where the semantic domain is known.

One way to do this would be to create a network showing the relationships between words within a cipher text, and try to find the best match between that network and a similar network for a known text.

I am trying these ideas out with chapters 81 and 87 of Melville's Moby Dick. You can see the basic idea if you look at the closest relationships between the top 20 words of each chapter:

Closest relationships between top 20 words in Chapter 81

 

Closest relationships between top 20 words in Chapter 87

You can see that in both chapters there is a little island of nouns (whale, whales, it, he), and another little island of determiners (a, the, his). Most prepositions are connected to other prepositions, and the pronouns "that" and "this" are connected to each other. In the underlying data there is much more information available about the closeness of the relationships, but that is not shown in these graphs.

The main problem I will run into is the problem of processing time. Luckily, in the quiet years since I was last writing about these things, I have learned to use cloud computing. It will just be a big job and it needs to be planned out carefully.