[Poll for Mark Knowles] Explanation for Voynich text?

[Koen G]

I am making this thread for Mark, who (due to a forum issue?) is unable to make a poll. This is what he writes:

What in your opinion is the most likely explanation for the nature of the Voynich text? I appreciate that you might think there are a variety of possibilities, but by the nature of the poll I want your top guess/choice. If you prefer you can list the items in order of likelihood as you see it. If you are unhappy with that you could put percentage likelihoods or probabilities for each option.

1) It is written in a known or unknown natural language in an unknown script
2) It is written in a cipher
3) It is meaningless text
4) It is written in some system of shorthand
5) It is written in an invented language
6) Other - please specify

These are the standard options that occur to me, though you may suggest others and I will change the poll according.

As someone who would firmly answer (2) in this poll I am curious how many others think the same. This is interesting to me as determining how many people have a similar perspective to my own gives me and idea of what level of interest there is in cryptography in the Voynich community.

[nablator]

Cipher is maybe too restrictive, I took it in the more general meaning of any type of encryption.

[Mark Knowles]

Cipher is maybe too restrictive, I took it in the more general meaning of any type of encryption.

Can you elaborate what you mean by that? What in your opinion do you think the options should have been?

[nablator]

Cipher is maybe too restrictive, I took it in the more general meaning of any type of encryption.

Can you elaborate what you mean by that? What in your opinion do you think the options should have been?

There should be an option for ciphers that are more advanced than mono- or poly-alphabetic substitution: they are in a completely different class and some of them might even be possible: with homophones, nulls or vord-segmentation (in 3 parts or more). Then there are codes and algorithms (not necessarily as difficult to use as a mathematical algorithm or cumbersome as cipher wheels or a code book). My own favorite anti-polybius is difficult to categorize: it is an algorithm but it can work as a simple substitution for one-letter vords and also as a code generator.

[Mark Knowles]

There should be an option for ciphers that are more advanced than mono- or poly-alphabetic substitution: 

I take your point, though I am slightly wary of having so many options. I could easily end up with 20 different options. Maybe I should have a second poll only for those who think it is encrypted.

[Koen G]

What is the difference between cipher and shorthand?

[Mark Knowles]

What is the difference between cipher and shorthand?

I would think first of all purpose.

The purpose of shorthand I think is to abbreviate text. It is a quick form of writing. It's purpose is not to conceal.

The purpose of a cipher is secrecy not abbreviation or quick writing.

Is there scope for overlap? Yes, one could develop a system of shorthand for the purpose of concealment. One could have a cipher which had features that act as abbreviations.

However I think it unlikely that one would find a cipher that is just shorthand, usually I guess there would be more to a cipher than just abbreviation.

[Mark Knowles]

So far the results are not what I expected. Option (1) seems to be generally the explanation found in the most publicised recent theories such as those of: Gerard Cheshire(proto-Romance), Rainer Hannig(Hebrew), Ahmet Ardiç(proto-Turkic?) and Janick/Tucker (Nahuatl). The possibility of meaningless text has been discussed quite a bit recently in the forum, so I expected more people would choose that option. Whilst shorthand has been proposed in the past I didn't expect it to be such a popular explanation. I did expect option (2), a cipher, to be quite a popular explanation, but not as popular an explanation as it appears to be so far in the poll.

[tavie]

I think the answer lies in Nabalator's point about Option 2 being too wide.  The problem for your polls is that people read the options differently.  

Option 1 hasn't been chosen because most - if not all - of the theories you cite would see themselves as cyphers, mostly simple substitution theories.  If the language is usually written in a different script, and the scribes used Voynichese instead, that makes Voynichese a cypher. 

So if you had split simple substitution from the general cypher option, you would get somewhat more representative results.

[Mark Knowles]

I think the answer lies in Nabalator's point about Option 2 being too wide.  The problem for your polls is that people read the options differently.

I am perfectly happy to rerun the poll with a different set of options, providing there are not too many, that people feel better represent their perspectives. I anticipated that it was quite likely that quite a few people would not agree with the options I have provided; that seems inevitable in this kind of situation.

I don't think, though I could be wrong, that Gerard Cheshire, Ahmet Ardic, Rainer Hannig or Janick/Tucker would describe their theories as being a simple substitution cipher, in fact I think they would reject the term "cipher/cypher" and "simple" could be seen as a pejorative. I sense that is how others who disagree with that interpretation would describe them. Ideally I want a set of categories which represent the broad range of interpretations and for which each respondent feels happy that their opinion is correctly covered. I don't, however, want a poll where there is an option that covers the opinion of each single person, so we end up with 20+ different options.