The Voynich Ninja

(04-08-2020, 07:48 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Rene,
the calculations I posted are my own. They are certainly based on brute force and do not assume anything clever. I just wanted to point out that the search space is huge: my feeling is that one is going to fall into local minima, maybe better than those found by Yokubinas, Cheshire, Ardic &C, but still inconclusive.

Quote:Many of the statistics we already have are making both specific cases rather unlikely.

I am not sure you mean what I hope you mean Please be more specific.

Hi Marco,

so I was reading a bit too fast... I have almost no time these days.
However it makes no fundamental difference.

I hope to write a bit more this evening.

Before 1500, ciphers never concealed spaces. So the most likely scenario by a mile is that full spaces in the Voynich Manuscript are indeed word separators (to a large degree). (Half spaces we can talk about elsewhere.)

This isn't a cryptographic lemma, this is an historical axiom - ignore it at your peril.

(05-08-2020, 03:58 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Before 1500, ciphers never concealed spaces. So the most likely scenario by a mile is that full spaces in the Voynich Manuscript are indeed word separators (to a large degree). (Half spaces we can talk about elsewhere.)

This isn't a cryptographic lemma, this is an historical axiom - ignore it at your peril.

Hi Nick,
I see the uniform layout of cipher characters in diplomatic ciphers as space concealment. What else can it be?

PS: For those who are not familiar with this, I attach a detail of cipher-text and clear-text from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that was mentioned on Nick's blog.

Aha! I need to be more precise! Before 1500, spaces were sometimes removed (as in the Steno cipher you correctly flag), but were never concealed, and were never inserted for steganographic or deceptive purposes.

That is, if someone showed you a ciphertext where every word was exactly five letters long, you should be able to conclude that it was not made before 1500.

Similarly, if (as with the Voynich Manuscript), you look at a pre-1500 text or ciphertext with spaces, there is no reason to think that the spaces are anything but word separators.

I have given the example several times of the page of text in pal.germ.569 ("Cisiolanis", 1426) that has had spaces added between syllables. There are also a few abbreviations and words broken across lines.

The content of the page does not indicate that it has anything to do with grammar or Latin lessons, it is full of dates and names, the kind of things people like to encipher, so it is my contention that this is text that has been processed in anticipation of turning it into ciphertext:

[attachment=4639]

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For example, "nobile lumen" has been broken into "no bi le lu men" and "maria genitrice" has been broken into "ma ri a ge ni tri ce" by adding spaces.


So, if one accepts the proposal the text was being processed in anticipation of being ciphered (the rest of the ms. is full of ciphertext and pages that have been cut out), then spaces have clearly been added to the preprocessed text, possibly to obfuscate word lengths and word endings.

If one does not accept that the text was being processed in anticipation of being ciphered, I would be interested in hearing other explanations for the added spaces.

(05-08-2020, 10:34 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If one does not accept that the text was being processed in anticipation of being ciphered, I would be interested in hearing other explanations for the added spaces.

To count the syllables more easily?

The Cisiojanus has a syllable for each day in the year. Its purpose is to memorize the most important feasts. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

You know, Nablator? That might be the reason.

But why is it sandwiched in between blocks of cipher? (I'm also wondering why the other versions of Cisiojanis that I've seen have not been broken up like this... maybe I haven't seen enough of them.)

Well, I guess Cisioianis could be sandwiched between blocks of cipher for other reasons, but the fact that the broken-up syllables are in a manuscript that's mostly ciphertext and cutouts gave me the impression that they might be using the syllable/ space obfuscation idea in conjunction with ciphertext.

But counting the syllables is a very practical reason, so perhaps it's as simple as that.


P.S. something I noticed about this version is that it's in dialect (which means maybe they needed to count syllables to make it come out to the right number).

Counting syllables in Latin is sometimes tricky. Later writing (18-20th century) conventions (mostly French I believe) help, with v and j replacing u and i where appropriate (which is not always obvious), so there is exactly one vowel or diphthong per syllable.

No idea why anything is enciphered in this ms., haven't studied it.

JKP,

some friendly advice:You really should start reading up  things before you start posting.

A Cisiojanus (sic, and not Cisiojanis) is a Liturgcal Calendar in a mnemotechnical useful form and has ot the least to do with encryption