One complication in this type of experimentation is that in plain languages, there will be some bigrams that are more frequent than some individual characters.
In the above sentence, there are five occurrences of 'th' but only one 'w'.
That is perhaps a special case, because 'th' is a single phoneme (actually, two different ones).
However, there are also four 're'.
Furthermore, there are probably many trigrams that are more frequent than bigrams and even trigrams that are more frequent than individual characters.
When one starts combining individual characters in the Voynich text, one can therefore never be sure if one is resolving a verbose cipher element, or compressing a frequent bigram.
Another point is the problem that one ends up with too large a character set. That can be resolved by assuming that certain forms refer to the same letter, e.g. (Eva) o=a, k=t, p=f, r=s etc.
While this may seem a 'dangerous' assumption, I believe it should be a necessary component of a 'verbose cipher' approach.
In the above sentence, there are five occurrences of 'th' but only one 'w'.
That is perhaps a special case, because 'th' is a single phoneme (actually, two different ones).
However, there are also four 're'.
Furthermore, there are probably many trigrams that are more frequent than bigrams and even trigrams that are more frequent than individual characters.
When one starts combining individual characters in the Voynich text, one can therefore never be sure if one is resolving a verbose cipher element, or compressing a frequent bigram.
Another point is the problem that one ends up with too large a character set. That can be resolved by assuming that certain forms refer to the same letter, e.g. (Eva) o=a, k=t, p=f, r=s etc.
While this may seem a 'dangerous' assumption, I believe it should be a necessary component of a 'verbose cipher' approach.
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