21-09-2019, 09:52 AM
One problem is the rather liberal use of the word 'cipher' and 'encryption'.
Friedman did not really say that it is not a cipher. This would require a definition of 'cipher'.
He did say that it looked more like an early form of synthetic language.
One should certainly not call Trithemius' third book a cipher, because it is a readable cleartext from beginning to end. However, there is a hidden message.
We don't have this with the Voynich MS for sure.
All the examples of ciphers in medieval and early modern books are cases where some simple operation on a plaintext was made, to make it unreadable at first sight. The Voynich MS is certainly something else.
Friedman did not really say that it is not a cipher. This would require a definition of 'cipher'.
He did say that it looked more like an early form of synthetic language.
One should certainly not call Trithemius' third book a cipher, because it is a readable cleartext from beginning to end. However, there is a hidden message.
We don't have this with the Voynich MS for sure.
All the examples of ciphers in medieval and early modern books are cases where some simple operation on a plaintext was made, to make it unreadable at first sight. The Voynich MS is certainly something else.