External text lookup

[Mark Knowles]

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.

That assumes two things that there could not have existed any standardised text at the time, but much more importantly given my own thinking that the cipher manuscript was being transmitted and was not purely for internal use. The cipher could just serve as an extra level of security should someone find or try to steal the manuscript rather than the manuscript being passed around. The reference text could then be kept separate from the Voynich manuscript and only brought out when the text was to be read.