Voynich text generation

[geoffreycaveney]

I'm playing with it, so I hope that Don doesn't publish a solution until somebody gets it right.

I will be very impressed by whomever manages to decrypt it and identify the source, because I have looked up every single significant text of the 14th and 15th centuries that I can think of or identify, and I haven't found a single one that begins with a letter pattern that would match Donald's ciphertext. I'm sure I'm missing something, obviously, but this is a pretty interesting challenge.

There's an error in your reasoning, and when I wrote "roughly contemporary" I meant plus or minus a century.

This is an interesting thread, as we're looking at the problem from the other end: instead of trying to decrypt the text, we're looking at ways of encrypting texts, i.e. putting ourselves in the shoes of whoever created the Voynich Manuscript.

Aha! You also have a suffix for a space between words, as you mentioned that the word breaks are significant.

In this case, the beginning of your text must be the beginning of Machiavelli's Il Principe:

"Tutti gli Stati, tutti i dominii ..."

The repetition of "Tutti ", including the space after it, matches the repetition of "qodom qodeey otaiin", and then in the second one the following word "i " including the space after it, explains the repetition "otaiin otaiin". And the "i+space" sequences at the end of "gli " and "Stati " explain the additional occurrences of "otaiin" as the 5th and 8th words.