Cribs in the Voynich MS

[Mark Knowles]

This is an excellent and very interesting subject. I thought it worth listing subcategories of crib:

1) A given Voynichese word corresponds to a given meaning. So we can say with confidence that this Voynichese word has precisely this meaning, though we may not know the underlying language in which the word, enciphered or not, was written. This is the gold standard of crib.
2) A given set of Voynichese words correspond with a given set of known meanings though the precise mapping between the sets is not known.
3) Somewhere in a piece of Voynichese text we expect to find a word with a given known precise meaning. The usefulness of this depends on the length of the text.

(This presupposes the idea that Voynichese spaces correspond to real spaces and therefore Voynichese words correspond to real words)

And of course of fundamental importance with all this is the degree of confidence that we can have in the crib association. Roughly what chance do we think there is that the crib is reliable.

So when listing suggested cribs I think it worth stating what type they are and very roughly what level of confidence one has in them.