The Voynich Ninja

(18-10-2023, 03:27 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the labels in the manuscript are indeed labels (each corresponding to some plaintext words or numbers), and sometimes they are located without any obvious sequence on the page (e.g., star labels), does this mean this method will have to restart at each label? What would be the correspondence between the encoded label length and the plaintext length?

Yes, a restart. I haven't studied the peculiarities of labelese, it could be a good angle.

Length is certainly a problem with short labels because the strong statistical constraints on all flavors of Voynichese have a cost: some shortening is expected after decryption if the plaintext doesn't have as many constraints (normal natural languages don't). I speculate that labels were often truncated, shortened as mnemonics. Another possibility in some cases is that two labels have to be concatenated to make a plaintext label. Look at the arrangement of central labels on the Rosettes page for example: 7+5 = 12.

Quote:If I understand the method correctly, the encoded label is between N and 2 * N characters long?

It depends. There could be a little compression when there are useful alignments in the table: several letters can be enciphered with one Voynichese glyph, or some cells of the table could contain more than one letter (usual Latin abbreviations like per/par, pro, us, um, qu...) or when n/m is abbreviated after a vowel: Sh could be special cases of (e, e) coordinates with a macron added for the omitted n/m letter. There is evidence that they used i with an attached macron (not ciphered) at the end of a few lines because of lack of space (written differently than n, not slanted) so they were familiar with a common Latin abbreviation and were likely to include some of them in the system.

Another interesting question, using #=IVTFF Eva- 1.7 from voynich.nu I get the following statistics for the paragraph initial character pairs:


122 + 122 = 244 or ~34% of 711

34% of all paragraphs start with either po or pc (i.e., pch) in exactly 50/50 proportion. If these two combinations pick a starting letter in the table, which two letters would start new paragraphs in exactly equal proportions, and would start 34% of all the paragraphs?

Edit:
For comparison the first letters of the paragraphs for Roger Bacon's Opus Majus:


Nothing similar to a 50/50 distribution covering 34% of the whole set. Note that I filtered for capital latin letters, because a lot of paragraphs in Opus Majus start with a bracketed number. But if I include those as well, the distribution is even farther from that in VMS.

(18-10-2023, 04:57 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.34% of all paragraphs start with either po or pc (i.e., pch) in exactly 50/50 proportion. If these two combinations pick a starting letter in the table, which two letters would start new paragraphs in exactly equal proportions, and account for 34% of them in total?

EVA-p and f are far too frequent on the first line of paragraphs (especially at the beginning of the line) to have a direct interpretation in terms of plaintext - if there is a plaintext. No natural language has much different statistics on some letters of the first line of paragraphs. They could be decorative littera elongata standing for something else, or nulls, or optional not-too-useful gimmicks. In a cipher like mine there are many possible paths, the scribe could have used the p and f coordinates preferentially on the first line without difficulty. All combinations of glyphs don't have to be meaningful. They are nulls but they are not useless because they define the current position on the table. Why put so many p and f on the first line is a different question, and there is maybe no answer other than "it looks nice".

(18-10-2023, 05:07 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.EVA-p and f are far too frequent on the first line of paragraphs (especially at the beginning of the line) to have a direct interpretation in terms of plaintext. No natural language has different statistics on letters of the first line of paragraph. They could be decorative littera elongata standing for something else, or nulls, or optional not-too-useful gimmicks.

Ok, but generally at some point at the beginning of any paragraph (or label) the starting character in the table should be selected.

If we select the 2nd and the 3rd letters, then the distribution is remarkably close to Latin for the top three entries, but then there is a sudden drop (95 sh and 27 or). Anyway, this looks reasonably close.

(18-10-2023, 05:07 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In a cipher like mine there are many possible paths, the scribe could have used the p and f coordinates preferentially on the first line without difficulty. Why is a different question, and there is maybe no answer other than "it looks nice".

I'm not sure I understand this point. There are many possible paths, but there are only a few possible starting points. 

Unless the table has some fields that encode empty strings. That is, when decoding and you get to this field, you just proceed without adding anything to the plaintext. Null fields as opposed to null characters. This will make the whole graph appear much more manageable. I was thinking about finding a limit on the efficiency of this cipher by computing the optimal table arrangements that would allow using the smallest possible number of target glyphs to be able to jump between arbitrary source characters, but quickly realized that introducing null strings would allow to use arbitrarily small secret alphabet.

(18-10-2023, 05:33 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Unless the table has some fields that encode empty strings. That is, when decoding and you get to this field, you just proceed without adding anything to the plaintext.

The table is mostly empty. A 18x18 table or a bit smaller (not sure if the gallows k, t, f, p should be used as coordinates or not, they seem to be added, so they could have a different meaning, or have no meaning at all) can easily contain several Latin alphabets and multiple vowels added, and a few double letters like "qu", "us", "um". A zig-zag path that does not cross a filled cell or only crosses it when it changes direction does not encode anything. The empty cells and multiple alphabets leave a lot of freedom in the choice of paths for the same plaintext.

(18-10-2023, 09:14 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's hard to imagine how oka could work both for the 3rd and 6th classical planet, in Latin or Greek, unless there is a "one to many" mapping.

Oops, I overlooked this one. As I wrote in my text on planet labels, one possibility is ok encoding "ve" if we talk about J/Iove and Venus, or it could encode "us" if we talk about Deus and Venus. The beauty of the distance based ciphers, in many of them you can shuffle the syllables all you want, the order of reading is not necessarily determined by the order in which the glyphs are written. E.g., at the beginning of XVII century a cipher like this was documented in Cryptomenytices, and the author introduces it as being reported to him by some obscure character by the name of Johannes Hasenbart. It's really hard to trace the origin of this feature, I couldn't find any other information.

(18-10-2023, 09:14 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I doubt there were any Jupiter worshipers in the 15th century. Classical antiquity was a huge source of inspiration for the Renaissance, but always in a Christian framework.

Interestingly, I looked up whether there were any attempts of restoration of the Greek or Roman religious or cultural traditions in Europe, and immediately found the following two examples:

1) Gemistos Plethon ~1355 - ~1452, contemporary of the VMS vellum, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Advocated for the restoration of the Greek worship and traditions, created a secret book called Nomoi.

2)  Julius Pomponius Laetus 1428 - 1498, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Studied Roman traditions, also had a kind of secret academic club dedicated to all things Roman

So, it's not that impossible for some Roman or Greek cult to operate in secret in the XV in Europe. And if they needed to create a book that talked about their values or deeds, it would have made sense to use a cipher and obfuscate the imagery.

Regarding the provenance of the 'Leipzig' pattern for the cosmos, there is a bit of interesting information in the article in Post #54. In Fig. 2 there are three cosmic diagrams, from early printings of Sacrobosco's text. They are [Date, Publisher, Location] from left to right: 1) 1485, Ratdolt, Venice; 2) 1488, Santritter,  Venice; and 3) 1488, Landsberg, Leipzig.

While the interior artwork on the four elements differs in detail, the two Venetian examples are quite similar while the Leipzig diagram is quite different, as is noted in the paragraph below the illustrations. Both Venetian diagrams represent the planets with their astrological signs arranged in a vertical stack. Both are encircled by an outer ring with the astrological signs of the zodiac. The 1488 Leipzig diagram is much different, Instead of astrological signs for the planets, each sphere is named for its planet. There is also a moon, a sun and five stars to represent the occupant of each of the spheres. There is no circle of zodiac signs. And the central earth is now a blank circle with two words indicating it as the "sphere of elements".

The diagram 1488, Landsberg, Leipzig has no astrological or zodiac symbols. Both the planetary symbols and the pictorial representation of the Earth's four elements have been converted to linguistic designations. A similar example of a code shift appears in the investigation of the VMs cosmos.

Now compare 1488, Landsberg, Leipzig with the diagram 1494, Landsberg, Leipzig from Post #6. The new diagram retains the linguistic elements from the earlier illustration, and it adds an outer ring of zodiac symbols. Even more, each of the planets is found in its sphere represented by its astrological symbol and most of these are located in the respective area of their primary zodiac sign. And they are arranged to give the 4-1-1-1 pattern relevant to VMs investigation.

Somewhere between 1488 and 1494, this significant development took place. From the article, it appears this could be due to the influences of Wenzel Faber. Could it be that the 'creation and composition' of the VMs is closer to 1500 than it is to 1450??

(18-10-2023, 05:49 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The table is mostly empty. A 18x18 table or a bit smaller (not sure if the gallows k, t, f, p should be used as coordinates or not, they seem to be added, so they could have a different meaning, or have no meaning at all) can easily contain several Latin alphabets and multiple vowels added, and a few double letters like "qu", "us", "um". A zig-zag path that does not cross a filled cell or only crosses it when it changes direction does not encode anything. The empty cells and multiple alphabets leave a lot of freedom in the choice of paths for the same plaintext.

I would like to include a reference to your cipher idea in my next text, that will discuss certain structural properties of the Voynich manuscript text in the context of one-to-many ciphers. Which link should I list as the primary source?