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Voynich Decoded
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| How easy is it to create a cipher which is very hard to break? |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 12-07-2020, 09:15 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (41)
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It is often said that the Voynich cannot be written in cipher as a 600 years old cipher would have been deciphered by modern cryptography by now.
However it seems to me that in practice it is very easy to create a "simple" cipher which is very hard to crack. For those familiar with Nick Pelling's Cipher Mysteries website it is apparent that there are lots of ciphers from different periods in time, though none as old as the Voynich, that haven't yet been cracked.
If I was creating a hard to crack cipher I would start with a preponderance of filler text, the more filler the harder to crack. However it would be interesting to see how others might go about producing a difficult to crack "simple" cipher.
(When I use the term "simple" cipher I mean one based on simple techniques or ideas. I don't mean modern ciphers based on modern mathematical techniques.)
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| How to decipher an unknown writing system? |
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Posted by: Torsten - 12-07-2020, 10:33 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (1)
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What does it mean to decipher a writing system? (see J. Gelb in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 1975)
- How does a script work? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- How difficult is it to decipher an unknown script using an unidentified language? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- What is a writing system? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- What different kinds of writing systems did we know? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
The glyphs
- Are there different variants of the same glyph?
- It is is possible to distinguish between different types of glyphs?
- Are there uppercase and lowercase variants? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- Are there any corrections? It it possible to describe patterns for them?
- How many glyphs does exist?
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]- How to determine the type of the writing system? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]- If it is an alphabetic script, is it possible to distinguish between consonants and vowels?[/font][/font]
Repeated glyph groups
- Are glyphs squeezed together at the end of lines?
- How to determine the writing direction?
- Are there groups of glyphs that do repeat?
- Does the script use some kind of separator to group the glyphs into graphemes?
- If there are separators, how does the length of the graphemes distribute?
- Are there longer groups of glyphs that do repeat?
Relations between graphemes (other terms for graphemes are glyph groups or words)
- What is highly characteristic for the writing system? Are there any unexpected patterns?
- Did graphemes depend on their context?
- Did graphemes depend on illustrations?
- Did graphemes depend on other graphemes?
- Can a grapheme be part of another grapheme?
- Did relations between similar graphemes exists?
- Is it possible to determine prefixes or suffixes?
- Is it possible to determine root forms?
- Is it possible to distinguish between different grapheme classes?
- If there are different grapheme classes, is it possible to describe relations between them?
The meaning encoded in the writing (A common mistake is to start with this question. But it is necessary to determine the way the writing system works first!)
- Is the writing system related to anything we know?
- Is there a relation to other known writing systems?
- Is there a bilingual text?
- How many script samples of different origin did we know?
- Does the writing system encode meaning? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- Does the writing system encode a natural language?
- What does we know about the cultural context the writing system was used in?
- Is it possible to detect the language family?
- Is it possible to detect a related langue or to detect even the language itself?
- Are there further tracks we can research?
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| How long is the VMS |
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Posted by: Tom Mazanec - 11-07-2020, 04:08 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (10)
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In number of words or characters? What short story or novella would it roughly correspond to?
And BTW, how would the Rohonc Codex and the Codex Seraphinianus rank on this scale?
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| A possible solution to the Beinecke MS408 using transliterated phonetic Hebrew |
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Posted by: Torsten - 11-07-2020, 09:55 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (1)
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[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]There is an unpublished article from[font=Roboto, -apple-system, system-ui,] Stephen Wells-Bennett about the VMS[/font][/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]The author says he was inspired by the book "Forgotten Scripts" by Cyrus H. Gordon: "In this book the author describes practical approaches and methods to code breaking that have worked successfully in the past.Simply [/font]put these are finding the right point of entry into a text, making an educated guess and thirdly luck! The author also advises would be code breakers not be too concerned about the minutiae of deciphering texts as most proposed solutions will get improved and refined because more people will study them [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]once they are published" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 2).[/font]
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| The Berry library |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 10-07-2020, 06:37 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (3)
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A number of texts of interest to VMs investigation have been shown to have been commissioned by or in the possession of the Valois Duke, Jean de Berry. Primary is the Oresme cosmos, along with the Berry Apocalypse; secondarily, the 'Romance of Melusine', along with the dragon in the book of hours.
This is the man: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
But what about the library? Apparently there once were 300 books, but only 100 survive. So there's two-thirds knocked off for starters. When the duke died in Paris in 1416, what happened to his library?
The situation in Paris was civil war. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The Paris residence of the Duke of Berry were plundered in 1412, so earlier books (Oresme and Melusine) were probably somewhere else.
Most likely would seem to be the castle at Mehun-sur-Yevre. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
When Jean de Berry died in 1416, his widow was his second wife Joan. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
She would certainly have retained some property, potentially books.
Joan was in turn soon married to Georges de La Tremoille. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
And Georges was in service to the Burgundian court for a period of time, possibly ending near the time of Joan's death in 1424. Meanwhile in Burgundy, with the murder of John the Fearless in 1419, marked by a major (+ library) inventory, there is ample time after that for the exchange of gifts, such as books, which would not be inventoried at that time.
No particular details yet, but a strong circumstantial case for the widow (and heiress) of the Duke of Berry to be in contact with the dukes of Burgundy.
The current position on the early history of the duke's library post 1416 seems to be: 'Hard to say.'
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| Voynich2Vec: Using FastText Word Embeddings for Voynich Decipherment |
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Posted by: Torsten - 09-07-2020, 10:55 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (10)
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There is an unpublished paper about the VMS: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The paper from William Merrill and Eli Baum is available at William Merrils Homepage You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The authors used word vectors to visualize voynich words: "The idea behind this approach is to encode each word as a highdimensional vector of real numbers such that similar words have similar vector representations."
The graphs illustrate that words with morphological similarity do encode similar word vectors (appear in the same context): "A variety of presumptive affixes are very apparent: [qol] vs [ol] vs [sol], for example. We can also see that certain letters are closely related and perhaps interchangeable with others. It is important to remember that these vectors were computed based on the word’s context; the fact that [qolchedy] aligns with [olchedy] suggests that they appear in similar syntactic (or even semantic) positions and not just that they have similar spellings" (Merrill & Baum).
The authors conclude: "While our morphological and topical analyses picked up on structural properties of suffixes and important words in the text, this does not necessarily mean that the text is written in a natural language. Formal language theory tells us that many sequences of structured text can be described by a grammar. Therefore, it is always possible that the properties our embeddings associate with specific suffixes or folia reflect non-natural-language structures or gibberish" (Merrill & Baum).
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| Categorizing the text-only pages |
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Posted by: RobGea - 09-07-2020, 05:46 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (22)
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The VMS has several fairly well definable sections but there are some pages
especially the text only pages, well, slight misnomer; text pages plus other odd ones,
that are not quite so easy to place:
Code: f1r: Q1 ; Intro page
f57v: Q8 ; (not all text, 4 people, circular text), LFD ascribes tentatively to Scribe1
f58r: Q8 ; 3 stars, sequential star points 6,7,8 , LFD:Scribe3
f58v: Q8 ; 1 star at top, 6 pointed, LFD:Scribe3
f66r: Q8 ; column of letters and words {der mus del page}, LFD:Scribe5
f76r: Q13 ; text only , [column of letters] , LFD:Scribe2
fRos: Q14 ; Rosette, LFD tentatively ascribes to Scribe4
f85r1: Q14 ; text only, LFD:Scribe2
f86v6: Q14 ; text only, LFD:Scribe2
f86v5: Q14 ; text only, LFD:Scribe2
f86v3: Q14 -(not all text), unfinished T-O map, LFD:Scribe2
then look for patterns and links between those sections.
Here is my incomplete and provisional attempt:
.f1r - pretty certain to be the Introductory page.
.f66r - most likely part of balneo , entire Quire seems to be a single unit.
.fRos, f85r1, f86v6, 86v5, f86v3 - I would call Quire14 a single unit , a section in its own right.
Leaving these as the most problematic to categorize:
f57v, f58r, f58v, f66r.
Any suggestions as to how to classify/categorize these unruly pages would be welcome.
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| Jan Gryll z Gryllowa |
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Posted by: aStobbart - 07-07-2020, 03:08 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (8)
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In "Historie literatury české: dodavky a doplňky, Volume 1" by Josefa Jungmanna, which is availabe on google books, there is a mention of a Jan Gryll who was sent to Rudolf II in 1577. Among other people, this book also containts info on de Tepenec.
Quote:Gryll, z Gryllowa, Jan. - Narozen w Rakowníku 1531; radní městský tamže; wyslán r. 1577 k Rudolfowi II. o potwrzení privilegií města, powýšen od císaře do stawu zemanského. Muž práwa milowný, nábožný. Umřel 1600. I have zero knowledge of czech so I am relying on google translate (how shameful), but "wyslán r. 1577 k Rudolfowi II." translates as "he was sent to Rudolf in 1577"
Anyway I made a quick search on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and he appears to be the author of "Sečtení rokův od počátku světa", dated 1588. This book is digitalized, and there is some gothic writing on the cover. Not surte if the practice of writing on the cover like this was common, but it took my attention:
If Gryll was part of Rudolf's court or in close contact, maybe he came to know about the VMS?
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![[Image: f115r.png]](https://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mwille2/VMS/f115r.png)
![[Image: f115r_shuffled.png]](https://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mwille2/VMS/f115r_shuffled.png)
![[Image: f115v.png]](https://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mwille2/VMS/f115v.png)
![[Image: f115v_shuffled.png]](https://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mwille2/VMS/f115v_shuffled.png)
![[Image: gryll1.png]](https://i.ibb.co/0Ddn7sh/gryll1.png)
![[Image: gryll2.png]](https://i.ibb.co/P4RxTyB/gryll2.png)
