No text, but a visual code

[Antonio García Jiménez]

I am going to talk about another great researcher of the 20th century: William F. Friedman, who with his wife Elizebeth spent several years of his life studying VM. Friedman was no amateur. He was one of the best cryptanalysts of the century.

We know the conclusion he reached thanks to another great cryptanalyst, John Tiltman, who wrote it in a summary of his own study in 1967. In short, for Friedman the Voynich was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language such as was developed in the form of a philosophical classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later.

In my opinion, the implications of Friedman's solution to the script have not yet been delved into. Any of us who have been analyzing the problem for years will have had the impression that the script works like Lego. You can put and remove pieces at will. That impression is what Friedman captured in his sentence when he said that the script worked as a synthetic language for classifying ideas.

What I want to say, and this is the fundamental idea, is that for Friedman glyphs were not just meaningless signs but symbols with meaning. Each glyph has a semantic value. I think something similar. But for me these are not phonetic symbols but visual ones, something like hieroglyphs.