The Voynich Ninja

(24-02-2016, 05:41 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello Sam, I am not an expert in the field of medieval cryptography, but I would like to share with you some evidence that you might consider.

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It seems to me that, even if the surviving evidence of Medieval cryptography is quite limited, it is compatible with what we observe in the Voynich manuscript.

Interesting examples, but for one thing these all look like simple substitution ciphers (other than the Lingua Ignota), where if you know the alphabet used you can read it "as is" without writing out the plaintext. But we can be sure that the VMS not such a simple substitution cipher of a European language, so the point I made above about needing to copy out the text, and then presumably also the illustrations in many cases, still applies.

And also, the motive for the use of cryptography in these examples seems to be protecting oneself from the church, yet like I pointed out above that can't possibly be the motive in the case of the VMS.

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(24-02-2016, 06:36 PM)-Job- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I interpret the second half of your original post as arguing that the cipher hypothesis is improbable because you can't relate to how or why it might have been used.

It's not just that I can't relate to it - I don't see that anyone else has put forward a convincing explanation, nor have I seen any examples from any time or place matching the relevant properties I discussed above, though maybe someone could find one.

Quote:Your point about verbose cipher and word lengths i agree with and won't dispute (nor is it my job to), though it's worth mentioning that, if you accept the possibility of a cipher, then spaces may play a different a role.

Well, the spaces aren't arbitrary - they delimit highly structured words.  If you took the spaces out, you could mostly figure out where they were supposed to be and put them back in again (though there are admittedly some instances of spaces in the "wrong" spot, which is hard to explain).  But even if you ignore spaces, there aren't enough repeated two-word sequences to consider single plaintext words verbosely encoded into multiple ciphertext words, as I pointed out earlier.

Quote:The low entropy of the text is not exclusive to a verbose cipher, or at least i don't see why it should be. For example, a code book approach using roman numerals would probably have low second-order character entropy as well, even though it is the opposite of a verbose cipher.

There doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to convert VMS words into Roman numerals, or any other kind of numerals.  Lots of people have been down that path.  Codebook in general has problems - the repeated and near-repeated words, for instance, would be hard to account for unless you had a very cleverly designed codebook.  There are other issues.  If you considered some kind of heavily modified codebook cipher you might be able to make it work, but then you'd probably have something that could realistically be called an artificial language, which would IMO be a step in the right direction.

Hi Sam, in my opinion, the only case in which the goal could have been hiding information from the church is BNF 7272 (but this case is also doubtful).
Hildegard's lingua ignota could have been motivated by some mystical purpose (and I think this could also be the case with BNF 7272).


The other cases (medical and engineering manuscripts by Foxton, Fontana etc) were apparently meant to protect professional secrets. For instance, what makes you think that Fontana's goal was protecting himself from the church?

(25-02-2016, 07:29 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Sam, in my opinion, the only case in which the goal could have been hiding information from the church is BNF 7272 (but this case is also doubtful).
Hildegard's lingua ignota could have been motivated by some mystical purpose (and I think this could also be the case with BNF 7272).


The other cases (medical and engineering manuscripts by Foxton, Fontana etc) were apparently meant to protect professional secrets. For instance, what makes you think that Fontana's goal was protecting himself from the church?

You're probably right.  The paper on Foxton you cited earlier mentions hiding secrets from the church as an important motive for cryptography, but reading more carefully I now see that the author isn't actually proposing that as the motive in the case of Foxton.

I'm not well-versed in medieval cryptography, but the vast majority of examples I've seen so far have been state secrets, spy missions (the creation of tactical maps and the collection of information about other cultures), warfare/acquisition-related plans, and correspondence among the nobility that is semi-personal semi-business (since there is nothing completely personal in medieval nobility).

Some of it is recreational cryptography (some enjoyed inventing alphabets and methods) and some is related to secret societies who used it to hide details of their history and rituals.


There certainly was motivation to hide things from the church, especially during the inquisition, but if cryptography were used to do it, it doesn't appear to be as prevalent as some of the other applications. There was also good reason to encrypt trade secrets, but it doesn't appear to have happened very often (with the possible exception of alchemy). Maybe they felt word-of-mouth was safer or perhaps many of those engaged in trades couldn't read and write in those days.

Thank you for the invitation to explain why i (currently) think the text is ciphered.

Because i see many people are doing the same things over and over, i will share some of my intensive research.
Read it or not, do with it what you want, but perhaps it helps someone to aim in the right direction.

Quote:JKP:
I think there's a strong possibility it's polyglot.

 
It is NOT a mixed language as presented 1-to-1 or substituted, otherwise i would have noticed that 100%.
What this means is, it is not like this f.e. "Ich spreche deux another language"
Also it is NOT that mixed language and then ciphered with a substitution algo or such: it does not matter to my analysis routine if it is.
 
 

Quote:JKP:
I think it might be heavily abbreviated as was common at the time.

 
The definition of abbrev. that i examined is in the format:  abbrev. 
So, the words always have a beginning, sometimes a middle and mostly an abnormal end.
This is NOT the case in the VMS:  most important observation: most words do NOT have a beginning.
For example: words are not like abbrev. but like bbrev.
 
Does anyone have a solution or clue how to abbreviate a word, without it's beginning. Let me know!
The only possible solution for that could be, but perhaps too complex for that century,
is that the last 1 or 2 letters not also define the abbreviation at the end, but also the first letter.
 
Because that is too farfetched for me at this point, i did not examine that.
I extensively viewed every other textual angle i can think of.
 
Another possibility which is still open for me is anagrams. But i will not go into that: anything is then possible
and makes the document unreadable and uncipherable to anyone.
 

Quote:Sam G:
 As of 2016, nobody has ever developed a cipher capable of replicating even a fraction of the VMS text's properties..

 
Well I believe there is a fellow on this site who claims he can construct such lines with software.
 
 

Quote:Sam G:
One of the most remarkable aspects of the VMS script is that it is designed to highlight and emphasize the structure of the text.  This is completely contrary to the purpose of cryptography, which is to conceal any structure in the ciphertext in order to make it more difficult to crack.  However, creating such a script is perfectly logical to do if you are designing one for a natural language.

 
Yes, currently i am looking into the possibility of a simple coded message with many nulls and few letters,
once i even counted spacing between words and letters but could not make something of that.
Now i am looking not in lines, but in columns and possibly random structured words,
but i don't know yet how i could construct words.
 

Quote:-Job-:
Is there a language or cipher that matches all of Voynichese's features? I think that should be the focus of this discussion.

 
Because the words, and letters in those words,  on 1 page do not match with the occurrences and placement
with similar pages of about 1 million words i investigated in about 35 (European and some abroad) languages i could not find a reasonable match.
I also tried shifting, replacing, ligature-replacements for the most obvious variants.
 
But yet, the words, letters, spacing, follow certain paths that are language-like. How can that be, if it is not a (known) language?
Because these letter-rules are much too complex in my opinion for that century it is more obvious to me that we are overlooking an simple but ingenious cipher.
 

Quote:Sam G:
Some people say it was encrypted to protect its creator from the church.  Apparently this is the church that hates information about herbs, but has no problem with naked women swimming in pools of green fluid.

 
Eh, there any many people in history that have been burned because of witchcraft for example.
 

Quote:MarcoP:
The other cases (medical and engineering manuscripts by Foxton, Fontana etc) were apparently meant to protect professional secrets. For instance, what makes you think that Fontana's goal was protecting himself from the church?

 
It was suggested that Fontana used the cipher as a form of copyright mechanism.
Since the bookprinting was not invented during those days, books were copied freely by hand.
There is no certainty on that argument but it is generally accepted.

 

"Another possibility which is still open for me is anagrams. But i will not go into that: anything is then possible

and makes the document unreadable and uncipherable to anyone."

They didn't anagram randomly as some decipherers seem to assume. They typically anagramed in consistent ways like this (as just one example):

nøca uøyo adre isth ?

Note the null char for words with an odd number of letters. Another null char (a different one) can be added so that words are of both odd and even length so as not to give the system away:

nøcña uøyoñ adre ñisth ?

This anagram depends on retaining word lengths (a space is a space) but if you assign a character to spaces, even word length can be changed (in fact a char representing the space between words can be assigned instead of the word-length-changing null char and then the actual space char randomly assigned):

nøca ñuø yoñadre ñisth ?

I just wanted to share this with you all.

As everyone knows, I'm not troubled by the text, and care neither way about it.

But it's getting to me anyway.

Went to the library and was looking up the Abbreviations Index for international journals and publications, when struck by the sudden thought - "this looks like the "cheedy" vocabulary test!

(It is called the "cheedy" test, isn't it?)

Here's one snippet, just for light relief
DEZ
DEGZ
DEUG
DEMW
DEUTLR
DEUTTIER
DEUTVIER

Quote:JKP:
nøca uøyo adre isth ?

Note the null char for words with an odd number of letters. Another null char (a different one) can be added so that words are of both odd and even length so as not to give the system away:

nøcña uøyoñ adre ñisth ?

Wauw, i did not think of such.  I tried nulls in many variations. But the combi of nulls AND anagram i did not think of.

JKP, or anyone, can you provide me (private ot here in a post) examples of such anagrammed" text ?
I am very interested in analysis of such !

If there are ms of such please let me know asap. As much as possible text would be very nice. As old as possible.

(07-03-2016, 01:41 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

If there are ms of such please let me know asap. As much as possible text would be very nice. As old as possible.

This is an aside, and not specifically what you are looking for (it's a one-way anagram approached as a game rather than as a cipher), but I mention it as a point of interest...

One of the most famous anagrams is the "long word" anagram, which involved anagrams created from a very long Latin word that has existed at least since the 9th century.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

I hope I spelled that right. The challenge was to turn it into proper Latin text (you can add spaces). Those anagramming it have been able to create more than 3,000 pieces of homily, history, and verse using this limited set of letters—and that's just in Latin. Obviously, it could be used to create words in other languages, as well.


What this demonstrates as far as ciphers go, is 1) that anagrams were definitely used by and of interest to people in the middle ages and 2) almost any chunk of text, if anagrammed without any specific rules as to letter order or spaces, can potentially generate a very large number of interpretations that are valid, even if they are completely wrong in relation to an actual ciphered document.

17th century scientists used to communicate via anagrammed Latin, as they knew how difficult it was to extract its proper meaning.
Witness the famous Galileo code he sent to several compatriots (including Kepler) to prove he was the first to observe the rings of Saturn, before he was ready to reveal all the details. The idea being that he could thus "prove" his discovery if someone else announced it before he was ready.

He sent the following message:
smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras

With no futher explanations. Kepler spent quite some time puzzling over the message and eventually thought he'd written

Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles.

or Be greeted, double knob, children of Mars. Kepler took this to mean that Galileo had observed two moons of Mars, which he (Kepler) has predicted.

But Galileo's real message had been Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi.
Or I have observed the highest of the planets [Saturn] three-formed.

Which little story (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) goes to show how unreliable such messages are.