[Article] Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript

[MarcoP]

I did join the recent webinar and by Twitter afterwards asked Claire if a numerical cipher might change entropy.  She said not normal substitution, but I asked if something a bit more complex might work.  So say o was 1, but ox was 14, and or, 15. She seemed to think this might be better but the convo ended.

An example of a numeric cipher that reproduces some of the features of Voynichese is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. You start with a short dictionary of frequent words mapped to Roman numbers; when you find a word that is not in the dictionary, you add it mapping to the next number. When the word already is in the dictionary, you simply write the corresponding number.

For instance:
c plinii natvralis historiae liber secvndvs
is ciphered as
CCLI CCLII CCLIII CCLIV CCLV CCLVI
(here there are no frequent words, and all words are mapped to incremental numbers)

Roman numbers have a low character entropy (they have a rigid structure) and consecutive numbers often differ by just one character: both features are also observed in Voynichese. Several other features of Voynichese are not reproduced by this system, but it is very interesting research, in particular because it is so simple.

That maybe would help with the repeats. Daiin, for instance, might be 22, equal to some letter, say T, so Daiin Daiin would just be TT in the middle of a word.

When you drop the assumption that Voynich words correspond to plain-text words, the number of possible cipher systems explodes. A word-to-letter correspondence of course would be a many-to-one mapping (since there are thousands of Voynich word types and only a few tens of letters).

Something that I find a strong hint for a word-to-word correspondence is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. These labels appear to correspond to individual objects. E.g. the 30 stars f72v1 Libra are labelled with 30 words; about 90% of all labels consist of a single word.