Morten St George Theory

[farmerjohn]

I think you are ignoring the 3 to 1 ratios that I indicated.

OK, let us try the thought experiment that you suggest:

moving across from left to right, every three glyphs converts to one letter (or blank space or punctuation mark).

As you say, 13 is M. There are dozens of ways of arriving at 13 with three glyphs (eg. 10+2+1, 2+10+1, 5+5+3, 4+8+1, etc. etc) but as long as you know the numerical value of each glyph, it can be done quickly.

Let’s now suppose the second letter is a A. There are three possibilities, 0+0+1, 0+1+0, and 1+0+0, to get 1. So there you have, in a matter of seconds, we have MA and continue on.

Some maths gives us the answer. Let a,b,c be natural numbers >= 0. How many combinations of a,b,c be there so that a+b+c = 13?
Since a,b,c can be repeated (ie, 9+2+2) then this is just a combination problem. The solution is given by C(13,3) = 455 combinations of glyphs.

First off, let me note that there are fewer than 30 Voynich glyphs - there are aprox (ignoring the weirdoes) as many glyphs as letters in a European alphabet.

So we need to assume that there is a one on one correspondence going on; that is, that both languages have the same gemetria system.

Voynichese glyphs are very highly positional aware - they tend to appear in the same positions and correspondences. I would say that it is impossible for you to find more than 400 different combinations to write the glyph which is equivalent to M.

The number of combinations from your example is probably C(15,2)