Re: Rot13 and letters with accents

Andreas Prilop wrote:

> The rot13 algorithm is applied to the basic ASCII alphabet only.
> When rot-13 is used with, say, German text, the special umlauts
> remain the same.

Vpu irefgrur qnf Ceboyrz, nore vpu tynhor, qnff rf avpug nyymh fpujvrevt 
vfg süe qvr zrvfgra Fcenpura, qvr qvnxevgvfpur Znexra orahgmra.

Wr pbzceraqf yr ceboyèzr, znvf wr pebvf dhr pr a'rfg cnf gebc qvssvpvyr 
cbhe yn cyhcneg qrf ynathrf dhv hgvyvfrag qrf znedhrf qvnpevgvdhrf.

Ub pncvgb vy ceboyrzn, zn perqb pur aba è gebccb qvssvpvyr cre yn 
znttvbe cnegr qryyr yvathr pur hgvyvmmnab v frtav qvnpevgvpv.

Did this reveal too much of the content, if you know German, French, or 
Italian? (Assuming of course that you pretend that you are fluent in 
reading rot-13 text. :-))

> Well, this is not a serious question or concern -
> just an observation. Any comments?

My comment wasn't very serious either, but my point was that for widely 
spoken European languages written in Latin letters, the problem is not 
very severe. Even if the frequency of letters with diacritics is larger 
than in the example, they don't "give up" much. It might be somewhat 
different e.g. for Finnish, which widely uses "ä" and "ö" so that the 
vowels of a word can often be seen in rot-13 text as plaintext - but how 
much can you really guess from the vowels alone?


Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/