A case for Gibberish

[Mark Knowles]

Dear Mark,

I am glad you pointed out (6). Examples of a number of quite distinct things having the same label struck me as very problematic. However I suppose I hold what might be regarded as a compromise position, i.e. that some of the text is gibberish or "filler" and some contains meaning; this is not unusual for ciphers.

That's a good point regarding the possibility of the voynich being a cipher, yet the availability of complex ciphers were non-existent in the early 15th century and this manuscript would have been decoded by now, because the simple ciphers were only available.

Not necessarily, it can be very hard to decode ciphers with a significant amount of filler text.