Voynich text generation

[geoffreycaveney]

...


This exercise is an excellent reminder that even a standard "Sunday paper cryptogram puzzle" with one-to-one substitution can be difficult and challenging, when (1) you don't know which language it is written in, (2) even if you think you have guessed the language correctly, you are not a native speaker of it, and (3) word breaks in the cryptogram may not match word breaks in the text of the underlying language.

Geoffrey

Yes, I agree with these points. And I really had to learn firsthand how MUCH of an obstacle it can be to not know the underlying language. I'll wait a few days before posting the answer so people have a chance to give it some brain cycles.

To have any hope of solving this, I'm going to have to ask for a clarification on the consistency of the character [a] in this cipher:

In the cipher text [a] appears 11 times as part of [ain], 9 times as part of [aiin] (including the endings of all 4 lines!), and 8 times elsewhere without [(i)in] following it.

Does a one-to-one substitution mean that all of these [a]'s represent the exact same letter in the original source language text?

I take it that [in] and [iin] are each a single unit, one letter each, and probably different letters in this cipher. But I take the [a] as its own distinct unit and letter.

It is striking that [aiin] is almost always preceded by [o], except for one instance by another [a], but [ain] on the other hand is never preceded by these characters, but rather by such characters as [p], [d], [cth], [s], and [sh].

Now this patterning is possible in Greek for example, where a final "-os" would often be preceded by another vowel, but a final "-on" might much less often be preceded by another vowel. Nevertheless, Greek final "-os" is also often preceded by consonants as well, so I wouldn't expect the universal "V+os" sequence in every occurrence.

So far the complication of resolving this unusual patterning seems to be the biggest obstacle to making progress with this cipher, at least for me.

Geoffrey