[split] Verbose cipher?

[Koen G]

Thanks, Marco, I understand what you mean and I agree. We can see space as something similar to any other character, but the same view would not have been possible in the Middle Ages. I would hypothesize that perhaps the spread of the printing press may have been a first push towards seeing space as a character. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. writes that "When typesetting, a printer has to think about negative space as something tangible." I think that the space would not have been something tangible in the manuscript age.

One option I think is missing from your overview is that the VM plays around with the room left between certain glyphs or glyph combinations. Sometimes there is a small space, sometimes a big one, sometimes it's confusing. So what about a scenario where they are converting their plaintext to Voynichese, and for some reason leave more space after certain glyphs independent of whether or not they were at the end of the word?

I'll quickly come up with a concrete example. Say that for some reason they assigned plaintext "o" to EVA-y. Now, EVA-y is a glyph with a "swoop", so it feels "end of word" to the scribe, so they leave a space. Like that, the scribe introduces a verbose system where [o] is turned into [y_], without actually having the mental concept of space as a character.