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+--- Thread: Useful Exercise? (/thread-4618.html)
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Useful Exercise? - Mark Knowles - 14-04-2025
Anybody fancy trying to decipher the following letter. It is dated to 1440 and from Milan.
RE: Useful Exercise? - pfeaster - 15-04-2025
(14-04-2025, 02:43 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anybody fancy trying to decipher the following letter. It is dated to 1440 and from Milan.
It looks like it's already been deciphered: nihilominus arca hec et alia quedam nonnulla latius intimabo... ("nevertheless, I will describe this box and some others in more detail..."), etc., etc.
But is the challenge for us to work out a key to the cipher based on the decipherment? That could be interesting.
To kick things off: that first word nihilominus occurs again later in the message, and there's a matching sequence of cipher characters both times, but the repeated part starts a few characters into the ciphertext.
RE: Useful Exercise? - Mark Knowles - 15-04-2025
(15-04-2025, 01:24 AM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(14-04-2025, 02:43 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anybody fancy trying to decipher the following letter. It is dated to 1440 and from Milan.
It looks like it's already been deciphered: nihilominus arca hec et alia quedam nonnulla latius intimabo... ("nevertheless, I will describe this box and some others in more detail..."), etc., etc.
But is the challenge for us to work out a key to the cipher based on the decipherment? That could be interesting.
To kick things off: that first word nihilominus occurs again later in the message, and there's a matching sequence of cipher characters both times, but the repeated part starts a few characters into the ciphertext.
Thanks for replying. You are right it does look as if some of the decipherment has been written.
Yes, the challenge is to work out the cipher key.
I thought I should work out the cipher key, but then I thought it would save me the effort and might be a useful exercise for a Voynich researcher.
RE: Useful Exercise? - Rafal - 15-04-2025
Well, restoring the ciphertext would be a rarher laborous and tedious work. It has been deciphered but it doesn't solve everything. The first challenge is to read it - the ink has faded quite badly in some parts of it.
It seems to be a quite advanced cipher with symbols not only for letters but also for syllables. It possibly contains some nomenclator as well and maybe null characters.
And it is nothing like Voynich.
RE: Useful Exercise? - ReneZ - 15-04-2025
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).
RE: Useful Exercise? - pfeaster - 16-04-2025
(15-04-2025, 12:31 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, restoring the ciphertext would be a rarher laborous and tedious work. It has been deciphered but it doesn't solve everything. The first challenge is to read it - the ink has faded quite badly in some parts of it.
Fading due to apparent water damage does leave parts of the ciphertext (and the "original" in general) either wholly illegible or very difficult to make out. Short of multispectral imaging, just viewing documents in this condition under a black light can be helpful, but I'll assume that's not an option here.
The contemporary decipherment is in a darker ink, fortunately, and consistently visible. But there's some difficulty in aligning it with the ciphertext. The first line of decipherment starts immediately above the beginning of the ciphertext, and it ends partway across the page, so I suspect this particular line of decipherment corresponds exactly to the (partial) line of ciphertext below. If so, the decipherment would then take up about 2/3 as much linear space as the ciphertext, which seems like a plausible ratio.
The next two lines of decipherment each apparently represent more than one line's worth of ciphertext, since both are written with two lines of ciphertext in between. But it's unclear whether each of these lines corresponds exactly to two lines of ciphertext -- the line breaks may just not correspond at all. The vertical spacing of the decipherment for the rest of the page still seems loosely consistent with the ciphertext having a 2/3 horizontal space ratio to it.
So aligning the decipherment and the ciphertext is another significant challenge. But working from the very end backwards, here's a guess as to the values of a few cipher characters, based on one that may be repeated in first and fifth position (though the two tokens might not be of the same type, given the difference in the stroke at upper right):
RE: Useful Exercise? - pfeaster - 17-04-2025
If these character identifications are correct --
-- then the following ciphertext passage --
should contain the plaintext letter sequence nc. The only word in the deciphered plaintext containing nc appears in the line of decipherment written right above the line shown:
... quem satis spero hinc mittere ...
So I'm feeling pretty good about those four character identifications.
RE: Useful Exercise? - Mark Knowles - 19-04-2025
This cipher is of interest to me as it is from 1440, if it has been dated correctly, and there are not so many surviving early 15th century ciphers. It should also be Milanese as it was found in a box of Milanese Visconti correspondence. I only know of a few examples of early 15th century Milanese ciphers. The most significant being the Milanese intercepted enciphered letters in the Florence State Archives from 1424 which I have written about and done a presentation on. This 1424 cipher shows features that I have not seen in later ciphers and a huge jump in complexity from the Milanese ciphers from around 1400. I have seen a number of Milanese enciphered letters from 1446 and 1447, however I am keen to get a better understanding of the evolution of Milanese ciphers. This 1440 enciphered letter plays a part in filling that gap. I am still very interested in finding an example of a Milanese enciphered letter from between 1425 and 1439.
RE: Useful Exercise? - Mark Knowles - 19-04-2025
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.
RE: Useful Exercise? - oshfdk - 19-04-2025
(19-04-2025, 12:01 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
As I see it, the main difficulty with this cipher would be properly transcribing the faded ciphertext. Out of curiosity I asked Claude AI to try inventing a transcription scheme and transcribe the ciphertext, but it couldn't do this.
I then tried o4-mini-high (one of the top models by OpenAI, suitable for "advanced visual reasoning"), it produced some correspondence, but I can't tell if it's bogus or not. At least it tried.