12-02-2016, 05:50 PM
Job's replacement lists here do seem to cut to the heart of something very specific to Voynichese: its curious substitutibility, which makes almost no sense if you stubbornly try to view Voynichese as a natural language.
To my eyes, though, these are merely substitutions within the Voynichese's cover text, where many of the plaintext letters and numbers are enciphered as verbose groups, e.g. or / ol / ar / al.
Hence, you would need to pre-parse Voynichese into verbose groups before you would start to get more genuinely revealing substitutibility tables: and this is more generally true, that all the while you persist in seeing (for example) 'o' and 'a' as single letters, Voynichese can (and will) make no sense to you.
But I suspect that even this doesn't quite explain the specific substitutibility of t and k. A decade ago, I proposed that these might instead be 'substitution tokens', markers for copying one or more letters from elsewhere on the page (or possibly even from a different page). But that's another story entirely... :-)
To my eyes, though, these are merely substitutions within the Voynichese's cover text, where many of the plaintext letters and numbers are enciphered as verbose groups, e.g. or / ol / ar / al.
Hence, you would need to pre-parse Voynichese into verbose groups before you would start to get more genuinely revealing substitutibility tables: and this is more generally true, that all the while you persist in seeing (for example) 'o' and 'a' as single letters, Voynichese can (and will) make no sense to you.
But I suspect that even this doesn't quite explain the specific substitutibility of t and k. A decade ago, I proposed that these might instead be 'substitution tokens', markers for copying one or more letters from elsewhere on the page (or possibly even from a different page). But that's another story entirely... :-)