The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

[-JKP-]

I can think of some simple steps that can produce a really tough cipher.

For example, suppose the author encodes the following text:

The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain

As follows:

De rhein een cepain faals mayneli oen the pelain.

Then writes it down using a different alphabet. The result would be essentially as practical as a simple monoalphabetic cipher but much tougher to break because it's less susceptible to frequency analysis (among others).
...

It might be much harder to decipher by frequency analysis, but it would not be very hard to decipher for the human brain. I recently deciphered a simple substitution code in an old manuscript by just looking at and I'm in no way a cryptographer. Just changing the shape of the letters doesn't change the function of the letters.

Changing "The" to "De" isn't a hindrance, since the Anglo-Saxon and Norse "d" character with the bar or the Greek theta immediately come to mind for polyglots and its position in the word makes it a high candidate as a definite article, regardless of how it's spelled. The short "word" in front of the fairly short last word makes it unlikely that it's certain languages that put the verb at the end. Lots of clues.

Your example retains the grammatical structure and the basic vowel-consonant balance at the beginning and end of each word, even if it has extra vowels inserted midword. Italian, for example, has extra vowels too, compared to some languages, so that detail is only a minor hindrance to decryption.

It might be difficult for someone who knows only one language to decipher but a polyglot who is used to switching languages in his or her head could probably make it out without any computer assistance. The biggest problem is not the extra letters, but the small size of the sample. The less text there is, the less opportunity there is to see patterns and how individual parts of the words behave.


If the above words were swapped around so the sentence structure is changed, then it becomes much more difficult. It would obscure the grammatical pattern. The problem for the encypherer is to do it in such a way that it can be decrypted/reconstructed. Cryptography is like bad handwriting. If you write it so you can't read it back, it's useless.