27-12-2022, 07:51 PM
I am working on a cipher at the moment and it has been very illuminating in lots of different ways. It got me thinking about the questions of corrections as I discussed in a different thread. I was just watching a video of Claire Bowern talking about the Voynich and she mentioned the subject of the difficulty of distinguishing between certain characters and deciding if in a given instance we have 1 or 2 different characters. I obviously was aware of this subject, but the video reminded me of it.
I have found the same problem in the cipher from the same time that I am deciphering. Sometimes it is not clear if two characters are the same or different. In fact this seems to be a common problem. So the Voynich is far from unique in this regard. I am not sure if there is a general method or approach applicable to ciphers of that time to discern the true underlying characters and avoid unnecessary duplication and incorrect conflation. I do think there is value in the exercise of trying to decipher old ciphers as it makes one consider simple common issues like these as well as more complex parallels.
I have found the same problem in the cipher from the same time that I am deciphering. Sometimes it is not clear if two characters are the same or different. In fact this seems to be a common problem. So the Voynich is far from unique in this regard. I am not sure if there is a general method or approach applicable to ciphers of that time to discern the true underlying characters and avoid unnecessary duplication and incorrect conflation. I do think there is value in the exercise of trying to decipher old ciphers as it makes one consider simple common issues like these as well as more complex parallels.