The location of <aiin> and <ain> groups

[Torsten]

About the “Autocopying hypothesis,” I see it as a special case of the “meaningless gibberish hypothesis”. Personally, being fond of medieval parallels, I find this hypothesis both uninteresting and anachronistic, but I think it is “not impossible” from a rational point of view. In my opinion, the only way to dismiss this idea is the convincing production of a meaningful reading of the content of the manuscript. Until we can read the manuscript, the “meaningless gibberish hypothesis” cannot be entirely dismissed.

It is not required that the VMS is meaningless for the autocopy hypothesis. In fact even for the autocopy hypothesis it is possible that the VMS contains meaning. For instance with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it would be possible to use autocopied words to transport information. For such a cipher it is for instance thinkable that a word could stand for a plain text letter. It is, for instance, conceivable that it was only necessary to count the number of e or i strokes to encode a VMS word.

Let us assume that the VMS contains meaning. In this case we didn't know the language and the script used in the VMS. Therefore we can't be sure if a VMS word stands for a word, a syllable or a letter. Let us therefore check what happens if we assume that a VMS word stands for a plaintext word. In this case we should find repeated phrases like "For instance" or "In this case " within the VMS. But they are missing. Since phrases are typical for language this is a problem (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
A second problem is that a dictionary of VMS words would contain 8026 similar words like qokeedy, qokedy, qokeey, qokey, qokeody, okeody, okeokeokeody etc. Therefore it is not possible to detect an error of the scribe or a misidentified letter from its context. Moreover since all words are more or less similar we didn't know if similar words have similar meaning or not.
Another problem is that the VMS contains monotonous sequences such as:
<f108v.P.39>     qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy qotey qokeey qokeey otedy
If similar words share the same meaning, such sequences would only repeat the same information multiple times.

If we now assume that a VMS word stand for a syllable or letter not much is won. In this case we would expect that a word used multiple times would lead to repeated word sequences in the VMS. But as we know repeated sequences are missing. We could solve this problem if we assume that a plaintext word, which occurred multiple times was encoded differently each time. 

Johannes Trithemius described such a method in his book Polygraphiae in 1508. (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Trithemius method uses a code table to assign multiple words to each letter (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The use of such a method would explain the occurrence of similarly spelled words. On the other hand, 8026 is a large number of different words for such a code table. Even if we assume that a VMS word stands for a plain text syllable we would get approximate 100 different encoding variants for each syllable. To search the right cipher word within a code book with at least 8026 code words is far from being easy.

Another conceivable hypothesis is that the paragraph or line initial letters are used as markers for a change in the encoding procedure. In such a case, one and the same word would stand for a different meaning if the paragraph or line were marked by a different initial letter. It is unreasonable to assume that such an ambiguous encoding method can be used without making any errors. Moreover it seems that we cant expect such a complex method for the 15th century.

If we assume that the text of the VMS contains meaning we will end with a complex encoding method. Therefore we should expect numerous encoding errors. Even under the assumption that an already encoded text was copied from another source, numerous copy errors would be expected. But places where a letter or word was deleted are missed for the VMS. Moreover the fact that the end of the text lines nearly always fit into the available space indicate that the text was generated during writing. Therefore the scribe was probably using a rather simple method. 

Did you really think that a method in which You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was used to add meaning to autocopied words is less believable then the method described by Trithemius or an unknown encoding method in which one and the same word would stand for a different meaning all the time?