Manual for the Solution of Military CiphersHitt, Parker
History
Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers
Hitt, Parker
Ciphers; Cryptography
With a few exceptions, notably Chinese, all modern languages are
constructed of words which in turn are formed from letters. In any
given language the number of letters, and their conventional order is
fixed. Thus English is written with 26 letters and their conventional
order is A, B, C, D, E, etc. Some letters are used very frequently and
others rarely. In fact, if ten thousand consecutive letters of a text
be counted and the frequency of occurrence of each letter be noted,
the numbers found will be practically identical with those obtained
from any other text of ten thousand letters in the same language. The
relative proportion of occurrence of the various letters will also
hold approximately for even very short texts.
Such a count of a large number of letters, when it is put in the form
of a table, is known as a frequency table. Every language has its own
distinctive frequency table and, for any given language, the frequency
table is almost as fixed as the alphabet. There are minor differences
in frequency tables prepared from texts on special subjects. For
example, if the text be newspaper matter, the frequency table will
differ slightly from one prepared from military orders and will also
differ slightly from one prepared from telegraph messages. But these
differences are very slight as compared with the differences between
the frequency tables of two different languages.
Again there is a fixed ratio of occurrence of every letter with every
other for any language and this, put in table form, constitutes a
table of frequency of digraphs. In the same way a table of trigraphs,
showing the ratio of occurrence of any three letters in sequence,
could be prepared, but such a table would be very extensive and a
count of the more common three letter combinations is usually used.
Other tables, such as frequency of initial and final letters of words,
might be of value but the common practice is to put cipher text into
groups of five or ten letters each and eliminate word forms. This is
almost a necessity in telegraphic and radio communication to enable
the receiving operator to check correct receipt of a message. He
must get five letters, neither more nor less, per word or he is
sure a mistake has been made. There is little difficulty, as a rule,
in restoring word forms in the deciphered message.
We will now take up, in order, the various frequency tables and
linguistic peculiarities of English and Spanish. Frequency tables
for French, German, and Italian for single letters will follow. All
frequency tables have been re-calculated from at least ten thousand
letters of text and compared with existing tables. No marked difference
has been found in any case between the re-calculated tables and those
already in use.
Data for Solution of Ciphers in English
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