The Voynich Ninja

This thread should give some context:>

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Logically I would look for similarities to the 1424 Milanese cipher and similarities to the 1447 Milanese ciphers. However it is possible that it has features not seen in either of these. Alternatively it may turn out that it is much more similar to the 1447 Milanese ciphers than it is to the 1424 Milanese cipher or vice versa. Still, it is a data point in the evolution of early 15th century ciphers.

(15-04-2025, 01:12 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is rather likely - but not certain - to be in the style of diplomatic ciphers of the time, that is a homophonic cipher (not a great term) with additional symbols for nulls, for letter pairs and for words (i.e. a nomenclator component).

I think the phrase "of the time" is quite an important one as there was quite a degree of change in the early 15th century. Diplomatic ciphers of the second half of the 15th century certainly fit that pattern. In Milan from 1446 that style seems evident. However it is unclear to me as yet when that became the standard amongst Milanese ciphers. This 1440 cipher and the 1444 cipher that I have shared elsewhere should both help to illuminate that. As I have, as yet, not located any Milanese ciphers from between the years 1425 and 1439 I can not say how Milanese ciphers evolved over those years, which is relevant as the 1424 Milanese cipher I have seen has some features not seen in later ciphers. I would be particularly interested in seeing Milanese ciphers from the period when Francesco Barbavara was Ducal Secretary and head of the Chancellery, that is the period 1425 to 1432.

The 1444 cipher that I referred to can be found here->

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Quote:I thought this could be a useful exercise for someone as there is a lot of discussion about the Voynich here, however one has the sense that few people have experience deciphering other ciphers, which could be relevant experience to deciphering the Voynich.

Do you know these guys? For me they seem to be the best
when it comes to classical ciphers:
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Personally I am rather crap when it comes to classical ciphers I don't speak Latin, like everyone here I know a few words but don't know grammar. And have troubles with reading the classical handwriting. I improved quite a bit since I got interested in this old stuff but still I'm a beginner.

I would still have a bit of advice if you want to deal with that particular cipher. You must work in steps:

1) Transcribe the original Latin text and translate it to English to know what it is all about
2) Assign parts of cipher to deciphered words. As others noticed ithere are not perfectly alligned but rather there is some offset between them
3) One by one assign the cipher signs to letters, syllables and whole words. This way you will recreate cipher key which is your goal I guess

This is quite a lot of work. Have you tried already to make a transcription of the plain text?

(20-04-2025, 07:31 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:I thought this could be a useful exercise for someone as there is a lot of discussion about the Voynich here, however one has the sense that few people have experience deciphering other ciphers, which could be relevant experience to deciphering the Voynich.

Do you know these guys? For me they seem to be the best
when it comes to classical ciphers:
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Yes, I know them well. I was hoping to attract some interest from Voynich researchers.

According to one of Koen's surveys, if I remember correctly, most Voynich researchers or certainly a large percentage of them have said that they think the manuscript is most likely written in a cipher which is not a simple substitution. Despite this it appears that very few Voynich researchers are interested in ciphers from the time of the Voynich manuscript. In fact, the latest Voynich decipherment theory seems to attract much more interest even though researchers believe it to be almost certainly incorrect.

(20-04-2025, 09:48 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.According to one of Koen's surveys, if I remember correctly, most Voynich researchers or certainly a large percentage of them have said that they think the manuscript is most likely written in a cipher which is not a simple substitution. Despite this it appears that very few Voynich researchers are interested in ciphers from the time of the Voynich manuscript. In fact, the latest Voynich decipherment theory seems to attract much more interest.

I think this is a correct observation. An explanation might be that pointing out what's wrong with a theory can be done by just focusing on what is presented, using one's accumulated knowledge of the MS. To learn about ciphers though, is something that takes years of dedicated effort, involving archives that aren't always easily accessible. Since we are all doing this as a hobby, it is up to individuals to choose how they spend their time on this. I would definitely welcome more people studying potentially relevant ciphers and telling us about them, but of course this is best done by people who are intrinsically motivated to study these ciphers.

Motivation alone only explains part of the issue though. If there were a particularly promising cipher, you would see this forum rally and hammer away at it until it's cracked. But all medieval ciphers unearthed thus far have been vastly different from Voynichese, both in their glyph set as in their apparent method. When people say it must be some non-simple-substitution cipher, they don't mean a polyalphabetic cipher or another of the usual suspects. They rather mean "something" we haven't quite figured out yet. The sentiment might then be (correctly so or not) that studying "the usual" medieval ciphers won't get us any closer to a solution.

If this is a useful exercise from a Voynichological standpoint, I suppose it would be useful for two reasons.  First, we might be able to figure out how this particular cipher works, which I believe is what Mark is interested in learning.  But second, presuming it has the expected features (e.g., nulls, multiple cipher characters for some or all plaintext letters, cipher characters for letter combinations, nomenclator-style word signs, etc.) it also gives us a nice opportunity to explore methods for cracking such a cipher.  That second reason is why I think it would be more valuable to work through the puzzle here step by step than to try to solve it in isolation and then just report the results.  So: If we've correctly identified a pair of cipher characters representing nc, then we should be able to leverage that observation to analyze the cipher characters to either side of it, since the underlying plaintext to the left should be ...citosperohi, and the underlying plaintext to the right should be mitteread....

[attachment=10349]

Let's start on the left with the cipher character that looks like a plus sign [+].

Since this is (tentatively) part of the word hinc, it can't be a nomenclator-style word-sign.  So unless this cipher is behaving in some unusual way, it seems to me that the [+] must be one of the following:

1.     a null
   
2.     a cipher character for i
   
3.     a cipher character for hi
   

Depending on which of those three values the [+] has, the [o] cipher character one position to the left of it must in turn have one of these values:

1.     a= another null; b= a cipher character for i; c= a cipher character for hi
   
2.     a= a null; b= a cipher character for h
   
3.     a= a null; b= a cipher character for o; c= a cipher character for ro; d= a nomenclator symbol for spero
   

There are other possibilities, such as [o] representing the combination oh across a word break, but the probability of that seems vanishingly small.

We can refer to the foregoing hypotheses as 1, 2, 3, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d. 

I believe we can easily rule some of them out.  For example, the [o] character appears numerous times in the ciphertext, but the word spero occurs only once in the decipherment, so 3d doesn't work.

Others are more difficult to assess.  For example, does [+] represent hi?  In the image below, I've marked tokens of hi in red and tokens of [+] in blue.  Not all tokens of hi would necessarily be encoded as [+], even if that's what [+] represents; but all tokens of [+] should presumably represent hi if any of them do -- again, presuming this is a "normal" cipher of its era.

[attachment=10375]

But tokens of [+] are trickier to identify than tokens of hi.  Some may be illegible due to water damage.  Others are visible but may contain extra marks that could conceivably transform them into other, unrelated characters.  The most ambiguous case, I think, is the [+] seen here closely followed by a dot:

[attachment=10374]

Given its placement, that particular token happens to be one that appears especially unlikely to match any token of hi in the plaintext decipherment.  Still, it seems more likely to be a token of [+] than the following cases where a cross actually appears to be attached to another stroke (and I didn't mark these in blue):

[attachment=10376]

The initial nihilominus, at least, definitely doesn't correspond to a ciphertext [+].  Maybe nihil was written as a word-sign, but it seems unlikely that there would have been multiple cipher characters provided for the hi combination specifically.  But more importantly, if we remove the two tokens of nihilominus from the list of tokens of hi, there just don't seem to be enough hi's to cover all the unambiguous tokens of [+].  So I'm inclined to rule out hypothesis 3, which would leave [+] as either a null or one of (probably) several options for encoding i.

Does this logic seem sound so far?  Is anyone else playing around with this puzzle?

(21-04-2025, 01:49 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is anyone else playing around with this puzzle?

I get a headache just by looking at it, too much strain for my eyes 

I think I said this in another thread, but ultimately solving multivariate substitution ciphers may be extremely important for Voynichese, because it's highly likely that whatever method Voynichese uses, after cracking the surface of it, there will be a simple substitution task in the end.