The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level

[MarcoP]

Hi Rene,
thank you for sharing this paper, which I find interesting, in particular for the "cipher" hypotheses. As you pointed out, there are Voynichese features that cannot easily fit with the ideas you discuss, but I would be curious to understand how close to Voynichese a text encoded in this way would be.

A question about what you write at p.13-14:

The question remains, how such a method could have been used to encode a meaningful text. A set of wheels as described here generates a list of words that could be considered an enumeration system, simply counting from 1 to some large number N. Hypothetically, someone could have generated a word list or dictionary, to translate words in some existing language to this system. This may seem unlikely from a modern viewpoint, but that is quite subjective. This possibility should not be discarded just yet.

The choice of three wheels with 24 different entries each also allows other possibilities. The number 24 represents the number of characters in the Greek alphabet, but also Latin (when equating I with J and U with V) and Italian (when not considering k or w). A text in any of these languages could have been split into groups of three characters, where each character would then be mapped to a Voynich word fragment according to the three wheels. This is of course highly speculative.

I understand the enumeration / nomenclator system, which is similar to the mod2 system you discussed on this forum.

On the other hand, I am not sure I understand the three wheels system. Is this equivalent to three tables, each being used for encoding one of the items in the groups of three characters?

For instance, the words "a bad cadet" are split into groups of three characters ignoring spaces:
aba dca det
Each group is encoded using the three tables, mapping each group into a Voynichese word made of prefix (Table 1), stemp (Table 2) and suffix (Table 3).
Am I interpreting this idea correctly?

I attach a rough example where the entries in the tables are not based on anything accurate: the function is just to illustrate the process.