Most Common Use of Nulls in 15th Century Cipher Text

[nickpelling]

The problem with nulls is that there is no such thing as a single "null strategy" for using them. In 1420, an encipherer using basically a MASC to encipher Italian or Latin might (very sensibly) add nulls to the ends of words to try to disguise the (tell-tale) word-endings. A 1450 encipherer (with two or three homophones per plaintext letter) might insert nulls all over to try to disrupt common words (such as "lo" etc) or just to pad out short words (that might otherwise be giveaways).

The idea that EVA '-y' might be a null is therefore an interesting one: but I think its strong affinity for pairing with 'd' (e.g. '-dy') is very hard to explain in those terms. My 2006 suggestion that '-y' probably stands for (truncatio) and '-d-' for (contractio) is still just about the only show in town.

All the same, the right approach to be taking here would be to find enciphered documents from 1350-1450 and see how people actually used nulls. Having nulls in the cipher key is no help at all in understanding cipher practices.

Mark: even though there are a few Tironian-like notae fossil shapes in the Voynich, I don't think there's any real likelihood that these actually function as notae. But I will try to have a look at the Gonzaga cipher ledger to see what's going on there.