On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[-JKP-]

Emma May Smith

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Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this?
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It depends on whether or not you consider the word breaks as natural breaks.

If you assume they are, ask yourself the question, "How many natural languages have certain letters that occur only at the beginnings or endings of words and never (or almost never) anywhere else, compounded by the fact that certain letters occur only in the middles of words and never anywhere else?"

Emma wrote: Do you mean script or language? There are multiple scripts with different forms for characters depending on where in a word they occur: Arabic, Hebrew (limited), Syriac, Mongolian.

I'm aware of that, but that creates a larger alphabet, not a smaller one—the VMS alphabet is unusually constrained.


If you mean language, then we're speaking about sounds, and the answer heavily depends on what you believe the words represent. If you think the words are single syllables, then there are definitely many, many languages which only allow certain sounds at the beginning or ends of syllables, and there is essentially no problem.

There is a problem if you look at the VMS statistically—it occurs to an unusually high degree that is not reminiscent of natural languages. I think it's possible that certain glyphs could stand for multiple characters, but that too reduces the number of glyphs in between that might represent individual letters and we're back to the same problem... unusually constrained glyphs that follow a strict set of rules beyond that of natural languages, a characteristic that argues against them corresponding to sounds if the word breaks are to be believed.

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JKP wrote: You also have to ask yourself whether any of the characters are null characters. Unless the subtle differences in letter shapes are representative of different letters, the alphabet is very abbreviated, about 17 to 20 common characters depending on how you evaluate them. If you then assign some of them as nulls, the alphabet becomes even smaller. It would be difficult to represent a natural language with so few sounds, unless it were an abjad or some similar system.

You also have to account for the very high level of repetition... not just when the same words are next to each other (which might happen in poetry or lists) but the high level of similarity of letter order in words that occur frequently.

Emma wrote: I don't think null characters are a problem of natural language theories. Indeed, it is the opposite, with most natural language theories I've read attempting to incorporate the whole text, and cryptological theories using null characters.

Null characters are a problem because they reduce the set of usable glyphs that refer to meaningful syllables or sounds. The VMS text has a low number of commonly used characters to begin with. If it's natural language and there are null characters in Beinecke 408, the alphabet is unusually constrained. There are ways of reducing the alphabet (u/v/w, c/k/q, c/s and, in less common cases p/b) but there's a limit to how far you can go before it becomes impractical and cumbersome.

I'm not sure if it's what you intended, but the way you worded your statement makes it sound as though you are putting natural language and cryptological theories in two different boxes. Natural language theories and cryptological theories are not separate problems since many enciphered documents are encrypted natural languages. The one that differs is constructed languages. They don't have to follow natural language rules or use the kind of alphabet that would be needed to represent a reasonable number of sounds.


But your two points seem to potentially answer each other: too few characters to fully represent all sounds and lots of repetition. This is suggestive that the characters may represent the sound of the language only imperfectly, not drawing all the distinctions that are present in speech. The reader may have had to fill in some details such as the precise quality of a vowel or the voicing of a consonant. This is not unknown in examples from history.

Most alphabets do not fill in the details of the precise quality of a vowel or the voicing of a consonant. Many languages have a few accents and diacritical marks but, on the whole, all of them represent the sound of the language quite imperfectly and require a whole extra set (sometimes dozens of characters) to represent aspects of pronunciation that are not expressed when writing normal text. We have no idea how any of the ancient languages were pronounced even when we have copious written records.