External text lookup

[Stephen Carlson]

As a simple example what if you select a word number in sequence from a text and the Voynich word was simply a number, which would fit neatly with positionality, I imagine. So ->

The Voynich word could be translate into 300 + 40 + 7
Which equal 347, so you can then find the 347th word in the text and substitute that. How does that method require a printed text?

Then you'd have to transmit your reference text along with your cipher text in order to read it. Printing is a way to convey the same text to two different people independent of the cipher text. But without printing, manuscripts of the same text didn't agree. Too much human error. A mistake in the first sentence would throw off all your counts.