[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[nickpelling]

The Friedmans concluded that Voynichese cannot be a simple substitution cipher more than half a century ago, so this really shouldn't be news. And Voynich words are way too short to be 'pure' verbose cipher, so that too is not something that anyone is arguing for.

At the same time, the tightly coupled groups of glyphs we all see - qo ar al or ol aiin aiir am ee etc - behave exactly how you would expect verbose ciphers to behave. Add in abbreviation, and we have a complicated landscape to navigate our way across.

Me, I'm still bemused by our inability to properly account for the first glyph of each line; for the differences between A, B, labelese, etc; for Neal keys; and so forth. And so when people try to claim that they can understand Voynichese without being able to link what they see with these strange behaviours, I'm naturally skeptical to the extreme.

So in many ways spaces are arguably the least puzzling aspect of Voynichese, because the historical timeline suggests that they are indeed spaces. Sorry if that's inconvenient. :-|