No text, but a visual code

[ReneZ]

Friedman said a bit more, partly in confidence to Tiltman. His message is clear enough. If he thinks that it looks like a form of artificial or constructed language, then he clearly thinks that it is not a cipher.

The problem with discussions about this topic is that the term 'cipher' is interpreted by different people in different ways. As a result, people who have similar ideas may be disagreeing in such discussions.

For the topic of this particular thread it plays no role, because either way Friedman still believed (or at least hoped) that the Voynich MS text represents some form of meaningful writing. He was just proposing a very different relationship between the 'cipher' text and the plain text.