The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

[-JKP-]

It would take a very strange person to add hundreds of pages of nonsense text to hundreds of carefully drawn illustrations. Even hoaxsters would find the task daunting and those perpetrating fraud are usually looking for a quick buck and would not have given so much attention to formatting.

The text is not random, as some have suggested. It's very formulaic, but not in the same way as "random" text produced via formula.

The content and format change in association with one another. Random, contrived text normally would not behave in this way.


I don't believe it's a 1-to-1 substitution code, not only because it hasn't been solved yet by many very bright minds but because it's easier than even I realized to break them. I tackled a one-to-one code in an old manuscript recently and it didn't take more than 30 minutes to decode it and read all the coded text. So... 1-to-1 substitution codes are laughably easy to break, even by someone with zero cryptological experience. Obviously the VMS is something else.


I think there's a possibility that what we see is not all of it. I'm not certain of this, but a piece of text might have to be matched with another piece of text elsewhere on the page, elsewhere in the manuscript, or in a list outside the manuscript. Even if this is not true, I think it's possible the codes are concepts rather than letters in the alphabetic sense.

I think there's a strong possibility it's polyglot. Not only were medieval documents frequently combinations of a native tongue plus Latin, but that native tongue may have been a transitional language. Many old manuscripts have a mixture of Latin, Greek, Frankish and Germanic, for example. This makes it difficult to approach the text with computational attacks that are tied to specific language stats (like letter frequency or grammatical format).

I think it might be heavily abbreviated as was common at the time.