The Voynich Ninja

(06-01-2026, 03:12 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I meant: if you want to mimic the positional nature of Voynichese glyphs and lower the 2nd order character entropy (h2) to match the h2 of Voynichese, you need more constraints: enforcing many rare or forbidden combinations one way or another is a way to achieve this. Inserting spaces is a way but it would create (too) many short words to look like Voynichese.

Using one character (letter or symbol) for several plaintext letters makes the next character less predictable after any given character, because there are more possibilities. This is the wrong way to go: if you want a ciphertext that is more Voynichese-like, you need to make the next character more predictable.

Surely its the opposite for this system? As there are fewer overall symbols, the chance that the next letter is any of those specific symbols is higher. 

I used your link to test a paragraph from english to cipher (using 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 (A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I) instead of the squares in my post. 

Here is the plaintext, curtesy of Koen's entropy essay:

h0 = 4.91, h1 = 4.29, h2 = 3.13

And this is the ciphertext of 8 symbols used in the OP:

h0 = 3.17, h1 = 3.06, h2 = 2.74

h2 appears to decrease with the cipher applied, not increase. This is also using a simple abc =1, def = 2 system. I would expect that by shuffling these letters around in their groups you could reduce entropy further.

(06-01-2026, 03:13 PM)kckluge Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Unless I'm misreading this somehow, this is identical to the type of encryption scheme Robert Brumbaugh proposed in the 70's. There's a Ninja thread on this here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. His specific assignment of glyphs to digits came from his reading of the marginal (Voynichese) text on one of the pages as cryptarithmetic problems. Back in the early days of the reading list Jim Reeds worked to analyze his paper "deciphering" the labels on a couple Zodiac pages and I looked at the "deciphered" Pharma page labels in another paper, as he didn't give the full details necessary to replicate his work. It goes without saying, his solution didn't go anywhere.

Could it work with a different assignment of letters to digits to glyphs? I don't know. You'll probably run into the same problem he did when he tried extending his technique from labels to the running text, which resulted in repetitive pseudo-Latin gibberish (which led him to the conclusion that the text was a hoax [by Dee & Kelly], with the decipherable labels intended to hook a potential buyer [Rudolph II]).

That might be so, i will take a look. To be clear im not proposing a specific solution here, but a type of solution or potential rabbithole. The main reason i found it interesting is that repeated letters could be explained as each glyph has multiple potential meanings (oo, on, op can all be same double glyph). There would be seemingly infinite ways to use this type of system, with an infinite amount of abritrary rulesets that could have been imposed (if such a system was used at all). However, i think that if you happened to find the correct system it would produce very convincing results. 

When i was looking at next step to this, my best guess was using different numbers of glyphs and different variations within those systems (such as grouping vowels into glyphs or something) and checking different language plaintexts to see if any are closer to what we see in voynichese.

(06-01-2026, 04:33 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.h2 appears to decrease with the cipher applied, not increase. This is also using a simple abc =1, def = 2 system. I would expect that by shuffling these letters around in their groups you could reduce entropy further.

There is a trade-off between reducing the number of possible follow-up characters because of the smaller character set and increasing the number of follow-up characters by merging the possibilities of several polyphones. (It's not the number of possibilities, it's their frequencies that matter actually.)

Reducing the character set decreases h0 = log2(number of characters) and then you have always h0 >= h1 >= h2 so making h0 low enough will force h2 as low as you want. But then you are no longer compatible with Voynichese, that uses ~20 characters.

There are several characters you could delete from the MS without it much affecting h2 though.

(06-01-2026, 04:46 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The main reason i found it interesting is that repeated letters could be explained as each glyph has multiple potential meanings (oo, on, op can all be same double glyph).

If you exclude iiiii and eeee clusters, which mostly appear in the same respective contexts, so it's not even clear if i, ii, iii are not the same symbol, the characters in the manuscript almost never repeat. I don't think a cipher that introduces a lot of repeated characters is a good match for Voynichese.

I think the Enn'agrammaton is a nice idea, and I agree with @ofshdk that it mostly resembles the Positional Mimic Cipher by @quimqu

The underlying concept in both is to explain the reduced character-based entropy by transferring part of it to an ancillary 'text' (the dots, in your case, 'residuals' in @quimqu's case). I would not exclude at all this possibility, but the problem is to find an encoding mechanism which actually produces a Voynich-like text starting from some text in some language. The search space of possible solutions is enormous.

(06-01-2026, 05:22 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a trade-off between reducing the number of possible follow-up characters because of the smaller character set and increasing the number of follow-up characters by merging the possibilities of several polyphones. (It's not the number of possibilities, it's their frequencies that matter actually.)

Reducing the character set decreases h0 = log2(number of characters) and then you have always h0 >= h1 >= h2 so making h0 low enough will force h2 as low as you want. But then you are no longer compatible with Voynichese, that uses ~20 characters.

How certain are we that voynichese really, genuinely uses ~20 seperate characters representing ~20 seperate letters, as opposed to 8 or 9 types of symbol? For example: 

[attachment=13332]

would effectively mean that each voynichese symbol maps to an intermediary symbol/square, as opposed to each meaning something different. The author themselves then chooses which of the symbols in the group to choose based on personal preference, a predetermined ruleset or both. 

When decoding, it may have been effectively like saying "is it a tall bench looking one" or "is it a bunch of C's together" as opposed to each variation meaning something different.

We can't be certain at all. Finding out which combinations of strokes form graphemes, and which grapheme distinctions are meaningful is one of our main challenges.

It's an interesting idea, but there are couple of properties of the VMS that don't jibe well with this thread's exact implementation of the cipher:

1. The token and word type length distributions. This particular sort of cipher does not alter plaintext word lengths, so the distributions of word lengths in the plaintext would carry over to the ciphertext. The quasi-binomial distributions within the VMS, centered on lengths of ~5-6 glyphs (depending on how one defines a single "glyph"), are unusual relative to typical Latin text.

2. Unaltered word beginnings and endings. As outlined at the beginning of this thread, this sort of cipher does not rebracket / respace the plaintext in any way that would obscure the beginnings or endings of the plaintext words. As a result, the words themselves would be essentially unaltered in how they statistically relate to each other. Word frequencies and skewed pair frequencies would strongly suggest the grammatical functions of—and the specific identities of—especially common words, from which the substitution scheme could be unraveled. That hasn't happened for the VMS.

But there are ways around this. As I did in the Naibbe cipher, you can strip the plaintext of its original spacing and then respace it—either randomly, as I did, or through some deterministic method—such that the respaced chunks are 1-4 letters long and that the spaces don't necessarily correspond to plaintext word endings and beginnings. In addition, multiple cipher-focused studies of the VMS have suggested verbose encodings (where "verbose" means that a single Latin alphabet letter maps to one distinct string or multiple distinct strings of Voynichese glyphs). This 2022 study specifically suggests a steganographic cipher in which one letter is often represented as a string of 1-3 Voynichese glyphs: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(08-01-2026, 11:05 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's an interesting idea, but there are couple of properties of the VMS that don't jibe well with this thread's exact implementation of the cipher:

2. Unaltered word beginnings and endings. As outlined at the beginning of this thread, this sort of cipher does not rebracket / respace the plaintext in any way that would obscure the beginnings or endings of the plaintext words. As a result, the words themselves would be essentially unaltered in how they statistically relate to each other. Word frequencies and skewed pair frequencies would strongly suggest the grammatical functions of—and the specific identities of—especially common words, from which the substitution scheme could be unraveled. That hasn't happened for the VMS.

This was part of the reason that I mentioned this line:

Quote:- Some common words/letter groups are represented using the same symbols (to/up , lo/mo , to/un , th/ti , ile/ime/ike , ne/nd/oe/of/pe)

Would the words still statistically relate to one another the same way if multiple different letter clusters all get represented by the same glyphs? Doing a statistical analysis of word endings for my example above would mean that the words:

Serene, Depend, Toe, Roof, Slope, Canoe, Sand, Ape, Proof would all be considered to have the same 2 "letter" ending. Actually, in that case "Roof", "Proof", "Canoe", "Slope" actually all have the same 3 letter ending as well. 

In situations where multiple relatively common words (with the same glyph representation for their suffix) are found throughout the text in different contexts, we would assume that suffix is far more common than it really is in the original language, and would struggle to understand the context in which it is always used (as we would unknowingly be analysing multiple suffixes, not one).

This could be the case with words ending in "daiin". We're searching for languages or ciphers that would cause many words to end with the same suffix, but it may actually represent many different real suffixes in the original language.