15-02-2026, 03:40 PM
Hello, All.
I am new, so please forgive my lack of completely understanding the current state of the research.
I was wondering what the current status is of the hypothesis that Voynichese is a delta cipher, in other words, the idea that it is the transition from one word to the next that encodes information -- which characters are dropped and added and where, etc. This could encode plaintext letters or the numbers of an intermediate Polybius Square. I know papers like those of Timm and Schinner looked at word similarity in transitions, but I couldn't tell the degree to which this sort of encoding was ruled out. I also would have expected modern professional cryptography to have cracked it by now if this were the case, but perhaps I have too much faith in that.
I am new, so please forgive my lack of completely understanding the current state of the research.
I was wondering what the current status is of the hypothesis that Voynichese is a delta cipher, in other words, the idea that it is the transition from one word to the next that encodes information -- which characters are dropped and added and where, etc. This could encode plaintext letters or the numbers of an intermediate Polybius Square. I know papers like those of Timm and Schinner looked at word similarity in transitions, but I couldn't tell the degree to which this sort of encoding was ruled out. I also would have expected modern professional cryptography to have cracked it by now if this were the case, but perhaps I have too much faith in that.