XPost: alt.privacy, sci.crypt   
   From: nobody@goldmark.org   
      
   On 11-02-10 5:54 PM, DasFox wrote:   
      
   > Is Parseltongue Cryptography...?   
      
   No more or less than when my wife and I speak in Hungarian to each other   
   in front of (English speaking) car salesmen.   
      
   The question is not a question of substance, but of definition. One   
   could pull out competing definitions to get different answers.  If we   
   insist that the shared secret generally be smaller than the message,   
   then things like this would not be cryptography (and neither would a one   
   time pad be). But by other definitions the answer is "yes". But in   
   neither case does it tell us anything interesting about Parseltongue.   
      
   Although different (human) languages differ in grammar, we can really   
   think of these as codes instead of ciphers.   
      
   Now when my wife and I use Hungarian, we are using a code which about 15   
   million people know, but not one that we expect the car salesman to   
   know.  This is also very much a "battle field" usage. We only need to   
   keep the secret for a few minutes (typically, we are just discussing   
   what our real maximum price is and what extras are valuable to us).   
      
   If I recall correctly there are a few instances in the Harry Potter   
   series where Parseltongue is used this way. I think Tom Riddle's   
   maternal grandfather used it when talking to his family when a visitor   
   arrived.   
      
   But I think that it was used more for authentication than for secrecy.   
   The ability to speak and understand Parseltongue communicated   
   information about how the person was. This played a big roll in the   
   Chamber of Secrets if I remember.   
      
   Again, natural languages have been used this way. In terms of accents   
   and dialects they this happens every day as people identify themselves   
   as belonging to some group through their speech.   
      
   So irrespective of whether we define cryptography in a way that includes   
   spoken language this way, Parseltongue is no different than any other   
   language except that it is spoken by far fewer people (leaving the   
   snakes out of it).  But while my example used Hungarian with 15 million   
   speakers, there are languages with only a few dozen speakers remaining.   
      
   The only thing that distinguishes Parseltongue from real languages in a   
   way that matters for this discussion is how it is acquired. It isn't   
   learned the same way that English, or Hungarian or Dyirpal is learned.   
   So it can play a more interesting role for authentication.   
      
   Yet it is still possible for someone who doesn't have the gift of   
   Parseltongue to fake it well enough to authenticate, as Ron did in   
   Deathly Hallows. So it can, to some extent, be learned by outsiders. So   
   I maintain that for the question you ask it, it is no different then   
   asking it about any spoken language.   
      
   Cheers,   
      
   -j   
      
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