geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Geoffrey, can you tell me how to encipher a text using your system?

Yes. The process is spelled out in detail on pp. 7-10 of the attached draft paper, which is identical to the draft paper I referenced that I have posted on Academia.edu.

Now I may add that there may be additional rules that determine that additional words may be written backwards rather than forwards, which were not included because they had not explicitly arisen at the time of the drafting of the attached draft paper. For example, I now think it is likely that words may also be written backwards in order to make the letter "p" appear first in a word, perhaps as an homage to "Percy" (the family name of "Hotspur" Henry Percy, another York ally and opponent of Henry IV (Bolingbroke)). And the same rule may be applied to make "t" appear first in a word as well, since the character for "t" has a similar shape to "p" -- these are simply the gallows characters. This could explain why they frequently appear in word-initial position but very rarely in word-final position. It is possible that this rule may be extended to the characters for "f, v" and "d" as well, since they are verbose cipher character combinations including the characters for "p" and "t". 

All of these rules would help to explain the low entropy of the Voynich MS text: The rules of the cipher are designed to make the first letters of "York", "Mortimer", and "Percy", as well as several other characters that look similar to them, appear in word-initial position as often as possible by writing words backwards in order to achieve this appearance. And the same principle applies in order to make the final letter of "YorK" appear in word-final position as often as possible, and also to make the hated letter "B" as in "Bolingbroke" appear not in word-initial but rather almost always in word-final position. (The latter is the character EVA [m].)

Please keep in mind that if you are not writing or enciphering one-line stylistic epigrams, the Middle English text that you encipher using my system of cipher rules may still not appear to very closely resemble the Voynich MS text. Not only the cipher rules but also the style of writing of the text can both have a very great impact on the final appearance of the MS text.

Geoffrey