(13-09-2025, 05:52 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Keep in mind that the VMS was produced by a human scribe, not by a computer program. A 15th-century writer could not have executed an algorithm that randomly deletes or inserts letters, since neither computers nor random number generators were available to him. (Siedenote: Someone from the 15th-century wouldn't even understand the concept of randomness. The word "random" originated in Old French as randon, meaning "speed" or "force," and entered English around the early 14th century, referring to haste or violence. The modern statistical meaning, implying equal chances for all outcomes, emerged in the late 19th century.) Instead, the scribe relied on visual recognition and cognitive processes: scanning the text for source words and applying intuitive modifications. In such a context, it is far more natural to substitute glyphs with visually similar ones than to introduce or remove glyphs at random.
They had card games back then - in fact card games first appeared in Europe a few decades before the Voynich Manuscript was made. Card games, in order to be fair, require shuffling before dealing hands. They also, of course, had dice.
I'm not saying that words were generated by repeatedly throwing dice or dealing cards from a shuffled deck, but the VMs scribes would have been aware of at least those two methods of generating random numbers.
(17-09-2025, 11:45 PM)DonaldFisk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (13-09-2025, 05:52 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Keep in mind that the VMS was produced by a human scribe, not by a computer program. A 15th-century writer could not have executed an algorithm that randomly deletes or inserts letters, since neither computers nor random number generators were available to him. (Siedenote: Someone from the 15th-century wouldn't even understand the concept of randomness. The word "random" originated in Old French as randon, meaning "speed" or "force," and entered English around the early 14th century, referring to haste or violence. The modern statistical meaning, implying equal chances for all outcomes, emerged in the late 19th century.) Instead, the scribe relied on visual recognition and cognitive processes: scanning the text for source words and applying intuitive modifications. In such a context, it is far more natural to substitute glyphs with visually similar ones than to introduce or remove glyphs at random.
They had card games back then - in fact card games first appeared in Europe a few decades before the Voynich Manuscript was made. Card games, in order to be fair, require shuffling before dealing hands. They also, of course, had dice.
I'm not saying that words were generated by repeatedly throwing dice or dealing cards from a shuffled deck, but the VMs scribes would have been aware of at least those two methods of generating random numbers.
Agreed: The Naibbe cipher name and methodology jointly refer to the well-documented existence of playing cards within late 14th-century and early 15th-century central Europe. Dice have been known in the region since antiquity. It's also worth noting that medieval people regularly used procedures that we understand today as random or pseudorandom without necessarily conceiving of the "randomness" by name. The You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. proceeded pseudorandomly, and at least in one case You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. to implement randomness. Various forms of You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and casting of lots would have generated what we consider today to be randomness. Medieval bibliomancy also made use of You are not allowed to view links.
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It is also true that we can use randomness in the context of 21st-century modeling efforts to statistically approximate what is at root a nonrandom process playing out within the VMS. I use a deck of cards to reliably implement the Naibbe cipher, but I am extremely open to the idea that the tables and ratios at use within the Naibbe cipher are really just average global approximations of some deeper, ultimately nonrandom scheme.
(17-09-2025, 11:45 PM)DonaldFisk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They had card games back then - in fact card games first appeared in Europe a few decades before the Voynich Manuscript was made. Card games, in order to be fair, require shuffling before dealing hands. They also, of course, had dice.
I'm not saying that words were generated by repeatedly throwing dice or dealing cards from a shuffled deck, but the VMs scribes would have been aware of at least those two methods of generating random numbers.
And don't forget bingo (extracting tokens from a bag). I'm not sure, but I'd bet also spinning wheels were known.