Corpus CusyA by Marie de Sade, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann, Authors ‚A, B, C, D, E, F, H‘ (classic romance novels txt) 📕

to decode the contents themselves sometime!

An alternative hypothesis for the existence of the decoded grammar is that CusyA has either already been deciphered once, but this knowledge and other documents on the meaning of syllables and words have been lost. It is also possible that the grammar can be traced back to persons who used CusyA to write texts themselves, as a help for themselves or others, recording the explanations for the translation.
The use of the short notation (e)BNF is of course not from original sources. In this collection this serves only to note down the grammar briefly, formally and unambiguously.

Abstract graphics have been added to a content page for this work as a decorative loosening. Similar to the glyphs, the graphics use cubic Bézier curves, but do without symmetries, so they partly harmonise with the glyphs, but also form a loosening contrast to the severity of the writing.

Similar to the Voynich manuscript or the Codex Rohonczi, the audience with CusyA is confronted with a mystery that entices them to dive into and explore, which secret, which treasure may be hidden in the texts, which insights and valuable thoughts may be encoded there by whom and why.
It is the fascination of the unknown that draws us again and again hypnotically to explore, to investigate, to find out what has been revealed to us on the one hand, but on the other hand is still incomprehensible. In such cryptic writings, the mystery of one's own existence and of all being, of the universe and of all the rest is reflected on a small scale.
This is another reason why we feel so attracted, this is another reason why we are so eager to decipher at least such small riddles, which as the work of humans or other intelligent forms of life (extraterrestrials?) should actually be much more accessible to the limited human cognitive faculty than for instance the universe itself, on which we have been struggling with the natural sciences for centuries, in order to wrest a little more preliminary knowledge from it again and again, in order to be able to survive better in it.

In any case, our analyses, our contributions in this digital book are limited firstly to the reproduction of the works known so far and the grammar, and secondly to a quantitative analysis, to statistics on the works, in order to draw conclusions about the quality of the text from such a formal classification, in order to reliably confirm works with content, which thus do not only contain random noise, but really encoded, relevant information.

In any case, we are curious to see what other researchers might be able to contribute with specialised cryptologic methods, for example, to solve the mystery surrounding CusyA and make the content of the works accessible to us.

Technique

We have transcribed the script of the contained works for this work into common font files for the first time in order to make them generally available in the form of the international standard for digital books EPUB. In any case, the originals or facsimiles of these, which are available to us, point to clearly automated production processes; the glyphs are thus clearly identifiable as such, and can therefore also be transferred unambiguously into the form of a font file. This stage of the transcription can thus be regarded as safe and complete.

Therefore it is necessary for the further text analysis that the used representation program can interpret font files. Since there is no standard Unicode encoding for the script, a private Unicode usage block had to be used here. So display programs cannot have any font pre-installed for this unknown language, they are dependent on the font files offered.

If the display program used has problems with the presentation of the texts, it should first be checked whether the program is allowed to use embedded fonts. If the display is still defective even after such activation of the book's own fonts, the use of a more suitable display program is recommended. It is therefore worthwhile not to give up on minor problems right away – alternatively, which is probably the more likely case – to be happy about a nice and correct presentation right from the start.

Technically, this EPUB has some built-in help to give the reader better access to the content. There are, for example, different style sheets to choose from. For a presentation program that can interpret EPUB completely, there will be such a choice. Therefore, you can easily switch between light glyphs on dark background and dark glyphs on light background. For your own settings you can use the alternatively available simple style, which only highlights or arranges some structures.

Available alternative style sheets:

dark on light: dark writing on light background (default) light on dark: light writing on dark background simple: simple style without colour specifications, especially suitable for combination with your own specifications

Authors as well as the coworker of this book have no influence on lack, errors, gaps in the interpretation of EPUB by the respective used representation program. With representation problems these should be analyzed first, localized. For this it can help among other things as the first step to check with different programs the reproducibility or also with special test programs to verify that in particular in the book itself really no error is present.
Correspondingly, it will subsequently be possible to correctly address a targeted error message. The authors as well as the coworker may well be the correct contacts depending on the error. With the quality of current representation programs these can be however likewise with high probability the developers of these representation programs. Accordingly as precise as possible data are always helpful to the problem with an error message.
. Generally the error rate is clearly smaller with representation programs of the type browser of usual offerers than with special programs or extensions for browsers for the interpretation of EPUB. In this respect it can be with larger problems with the representation likewise a way out to unpack the EPUB-archive (it concerns with EPUB always an archive of the type ZIP, to read the book then directly in the browser, for which first the file Inhaltsverzeichnis.xhtml is to be opened in the directory Inhalt, in order to get an entrance into the reading order as well as an overview of contents. Over the reference function of the directory can be called afterwards in each case the desired contents.
This procedure can be equally useful to locate problems or errors. For single documents, other check programs can also be used.

Automatic conversions of this book in the format EPUB to other formats can cause various defects, which can be caused by errors and problems of the too naive and simply designed conversion programs as well as by the format into which it is converted. The authors and staff of this book have no control over later manipulations or format conversions, so they have no influence on the complete availability of content and help information of such manipulated versions. They therefore strongly recommend to use the unchanged original and to have it presented by a powerful presentation program.

Manually it is quite easy to simplify some techniques and features of the book so far, to prepare content differently, to make it also available in reduced quality in other formats. Especially with still quite popular proprietary Amazon formats (Mobipocket or KF8) it is quite easy to create a simplified EPUB from which you can create a readable book in these inferior formats, if you are familiar with EPUB and the possibilities of these formats.

Quantitative and Comparative Text Analysis: Evaluation Methods

For the quantitative and comparative text analysis of the available CusyA works a self-developed script is used, which was not optimised however meantime on special, already known structures of CusyA, which is why the results are directly comparable with those of already examined texts. Analyses of other books (German, English) with this script are available in the book Ic, for example for comparison.

Digital works in text-based formats such as EPUB are excellent for quantitative text analysis with programs or scripts designed for this purpose. It is therefore relatively easy to use computers to gain quick access to the actual body of a book's text and subject it to systematic analysis. Thus, statistical data can be quickly extracted from a book. The statistical data of different works can thus be relatively easily prepared and compared with each other.

To compare digital works, only a few special tools are needed for analysis. The EPUB mainly contains content files besides some other files. These are mainly XHTML files with regard to text content, but content can also be contained in vector graphics, thus in SVG files. Both are XML formats, therefore they have a defined syntax that makes it relatively easy to analyse the content.

After checking for technical defects, the next step is to compile statistics of the elements used. It is thus determined on a semantic level what can be found in the book.
In the case of the CusyA, both are not relevant for their original content, because the texts on the XHTML level were not created by the authors of the texts.
However, the available facsimiles were clear enough to be digitally captured and set in a relatively simple semantic text markup.

In a further step, certain attributes are extracted as special content if they contain text information, such as alternative texts or descriptions of illustrations outside the normal text flow, as well as special user aids, explanations of abbreviations, meta-information, etc.
As a small correction of the statistics, identically multiple special contents are counted only once. This prevents, for example, that relatively irrelevant text alternatives for actually decorative, repeatedly used images lead to artefacts in distributions. Similar artefacts would also result in the names of alternative style sheets, because these are specified anew for each individual content file, but do not provide any new information, merely a user help for selecting the appropriate style sheet.

XHTML distinguishes between inline elements or phrase elements on the one hand and block elements on the other. Phrase elements occur within the normal text flow, block elements form their own text segments, including headings, paragraphs, sections, lists, and so on.
In addition, there are also elements that are always empty, therefore they do not contribute to the text, for example elements for horizontal interrupters, elements for referencing images to be displayed. Furthermore, there are also elements that are transparent, this means, they can have all the content that their parent element can have, so they are no longer relevant for an evaluation at this point.
With regard to text analysis, the markers of the phrase elements can be removed from the document to be analysed at this point, as can the always empty elements and the markers of most transparent elements.

After that, block elements that are potentially nested in each other remain. Consequently, in the next step, this structure is linearised or unnested, this means, the elements are put into an unambiguous sequence one after the other. Successive spaces are replaced by exactly one space each. Elements that are empty or only contain blanks are counted as such, otherwise they are not taken into account because their content is meaningless and inadequate.

For elements where it is not semantically clear that their content is roughly equivalent to a paragraph or only a sentence, a single word or character, the content is roughly examined for punctuation and length. If they are sufficiently complex, these elements are considered equivalent to paragraphs, otherwise equivalent to a sentence or word, and then statistically evaluated.

For