Posted by Dave Thewlis on May 07, 2001 at 01:07:01 from 63.200.128.218:
In Reply to: Ransome's Art of Secure Communications posted by Dave W on May 06, 2001 at 09:15:58:
Actually, it is more likely that Missee Lee's whistlers were actually using Morse, with one
tone for dot and another for dash. Over long distances that would be much easier to follow than
comparative short and long whistles, especially since it is a lot easier to change notes than to
start and stop a blown note on a whistle. So it would be more like a carrier-shift scheme.
An alternative to the code book approach does exist. By the time of the Missee Lee story, a Roman-
character alphabet transliteration of Chinese did exist and was in some use in China; today you see
it everywhere in store signs and so forth, even though the 'real' written language is still ideographic
with about 5000 signs. I think the character transliteration was more or less phonetic (although clumsy
attempts and phoneticism led to 'Peking' which is now 'Beijing' and so forth). I would give more details
but I am not a student of Chinese although I've talked to a few.
So Missee Lee could very well have them simply using morse to send the phonetic characters of the Chinese
of the message, or could be imposing a cipher on top of the transliteration. I don't think we have enough
information to make a judgement on code books versus cipher versus plain text of the phonetic Chinese.