I am delighted to learn that our good friend, Kevin Graham, has taken on educting himself a bit about ciphers, and has advanced far enough in his studies to be able to tell the difference between cipher, encipher, and decipher. This is akin in math to learning the difference between a set and subsets, or in logic the difference between the whole and its parts.
This little bit of knowledge that he has gained has evidently emboldened him to proclaim: "To decipher, which basically means 'to make out the meaning of something' only pertains to ciphers when used within that context, but in the context of languages it is pretty much synonymous with 'translating.'"
I trust that as Kevin continues his studies, he will realize that ciphers are essentially languages, and that in the context of ciphers, the term "decipher" is also synoymous with "translating". Had he read my paper linked to earlier, he would have already discovered this.
As he also learns more about the Rosetta Stone, he will realize that the stone wasn't a translation key nor did it immediately provide a means for translation--certainly not in the sense that most languages are translated. Rather, the stone made it possible for men to, after years of studying the stone, figure out the meaning of the heiroglyphs. The Egyptian lanuage that was used on the stone couldn't be translated (in the sense that Kevin is using the term) until after the characters had been deciphered or decoded. In short, the Rosetta Stone did have the context of a cipher. In fact, as previously mentioned, the most common idiomatic use of the term "Rosetta Stone" is: to "represent a crucial
key to the process of
decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognised as the clue to understanding a larger whole." (See:
HERE--emphasis mine)
Kevin was astute enough to realize that in order to decipher, there needs to be a cipher key. And, as it turns out, the Rosetta Stone provided just such a key--and this via the other two of three texts on the stone: "the upper one is in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle one in Egyptian demotic script, and the lower text in ancient Greek."(ibid). By comparing the two Egyptian text to the Greek, and using what little was known of the demotic, men were able to eventually decode the meaning of the heiroglyphs, and from that later create an alphabet and grammer that was then used to translate other Egyptian texts. Again, the Rosetta Stone was very much a cipher context.
Unfortunately, though, Kevin's cipher education only got so far as to inform him about the most simple and basic form of ciphers--i.e. the substitution cipher. And, in spite of his relative ignorance on the matter, he dogmatically exclaimed: "The KEP provides nothing that could reasonably be understood as a 'cipher key'....Moreover, Ciphers do not have an 'alphabet' let alone a 'grammar,' nor do they typically involve 'sounds.'"
The hubris of this declaration is as unwarranted as it is mistaken. If Kevin would take a moment to read my paper (which I linked to earlier), he may discover that not only do I show how the KEP have characters in common with noted ciphers, but they also have the same form as certain ciphers (including alphabets and grammars), but they function like a cipher--including through the use of sounds.
Now, regarding the sounds, it may prove instructive to recall that in the several years leading up to the production of the KEP, there were a few occasions when the "pure language" was SPOKEN, and even interpreted (deciphered). Could that have been the source for some of the KEP sounds? I don't know, but it is something to look into.
Thanks, -Wade Englund-