(23-10-2023, 02:00 PM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A criticism of this method included that it was not considered realistic that many different plaintext words would, by chance, result in the same cipher text word (e.g. Eva chedy).
As long as cipher text word boundaries differ from plaintext word boundaries, I guess, these frequent chunks of cipher text could correspond to common subword sequences in the plaintext. E.g., the following are the 20 top frequent 4-letter sequences and their counts from Opus Majus, about 4% of the whole text are these patterns.
3515 quod, 2785 ibus, 2757 ione, 2562 tion, 2497 enti, 2380 orum, 2244 itat, 2216 atur, 1982 atio, 1913 tate, 1852 sunt, 1841 prop, 1730 itur, 1651 ntia, 1603 ntur, 1597 ndum, 1592 quam, 1518 cund, 1509 ient, 1509 ecun
It's still not nearly as many as in Voynich, Voynichese words are closer to the character bigram distribution for Opus Majus, where top 20 character bigrams correspond to 20% of the text and they are:
24249 er, 20968 et, 20924 in, 19784 um, 18400 nt, 18195 qu, 18013 it, 17621 es, 17516 ti, 17453 te, 17274 is, 15926 us, 15749 tu, 15271 en, 14949 ri, 14629 on, 14477 at, 13970 li, 13516 re, 13306 st
I'm not sure that this is what happens with Voynich though.
For distance ciphers in particular, sequences like y.okey.qokeedy.qokeedy.qokedy could be parsed as, for example, on the picture below, assuming that y/o/qo/d pair among themselves with k pairing separately (it's just one random arrangement, I didn't think it through) and eee being nulls. Which encodes a very normal looking English word sequence.
(If you didn't read my text on distance ciphers, minimum matching distance is often at least two characters wide to allow for easier interleaving of pairs, characters next to each other without a space never match up, e.g., like dy at the end of the first qokeedy below.)