What I found interesting about Hebrew in particular, is that it ALMOST looks like Latin characters when it is flipped around. Not late-Medieval, the shapes are definitely more similar to early-Medieval scripts (with the double-cee form of “a” for example), but if you were to rewrite the upside-down script with a couple of the glyphs changed to different shapes so the Hebrew was less obvious, it would bear some resemblance to cipher-text.

Some of the Asian scripts take on interesting shapes when they are mirrored or rotated (I tried this with almost every alphabet on the planet). Not the Chinese scripts, they are easily recognized in any orientation, but some of the Malaysian scripts had some interesting properties when flipped around.

It’s a good exercise though. If you flip Hebrew around, you get a new script nobody is familiar with. How do you parse it, which glyphs are different? These are familiar problems.

Yes, it is. I expected someone who knew Hebrew would recognize it right away, but was hoping it might sit for a day or so before that happened. Most of use would recognize upside-down text in languages we know well.

You’re not raining on the parade, however. I think it was still worth posting because this is what I do with every new language and alphabet I investigate, to see if the VMS shapes, or the VMS text (which are two different issues) might in any way relate to inverse or mirrored text. If one could take a foreign script and assign values to the shapes and then transcribe it rotated or mirrored in some direction (especially if some characters that are ligatures then become single glyphs in a consistent way), then you end up with something that’s a half step away from a simple substitution code. It would still be easy to break, but it would be an interesting way to design a cipher if one extra step were then applied after transcribing it. It would also be interesting if the first step were to rotate each individual character 45° so the shapes take on different relationships to each other.

Thanks for participating. I considered waiting a half day or so to approve your comment, so others would have a chance to see it without a spoiler, but somehow that didn’t seem fair to you, so here it is. 🙂