[split] Diplomatic ciphers

[Mark Knowles]

JKP: I will look through what you have written. I should say that

"it would have to steal part of the adjacent biglyph to be valid"

It could be that a given text has a small number of different possible readings e.g.

"qzppi"

"kkaff"

"hello"

Clearly the decipherer would recognise the correct reading as "hello", because the other readings would be meaningless, so as I said before with blocks the decipherer/reader may have to exert a little intelligence to determine which are the correct blocks in a given instance in order to produce intelligible text.

e.g.

#%#$#

could be blocks 

#%# followed by $#

or

#% followed by #$#

where

#%#       ->     a

$#          ->      t

#%          ->      z

#$#        ->       q

So the whole "word" could map to either

at          or         zq

(I am not saying this how it does work just floating a possibility.)

Similarly in diplomatic ciphers of the 1440s we see letter pairs mapping to characters. (I date the Voynich to around the early 1430s.)

For example in our context we could have:

$#      ->        ba
#$      ->        oc

$%      ->        pp
%$      ->        fr

Again all these are examples of specific points rather than a general illustration.