I'd like to test a few potential ciphers to check whether one of them could be it. If Voynichese is a cipher and the manuscript was created in Europe in the 15th century, which languages and which flavo(u)rs of them would be the most likely for the plaintext? Let's assume there is nothing exotic and unexpected about the language, and it's one of the normal languages that manuscripts were written in.
According to ChatGPT, the list of the most popular written languages in the XV century Europe is: Latin, Middle French, Middle High German, Middle English, Various Italian dialects (doesn't sound very helpful), Castilian, Middle Dutch.
Is this list reasonable? What about Greek and Arabic, were they used in parts of Europe at that time?
Could someone suggest a good resource to find samples of each of these language variants, preferably both transcribed and as a photo? I think a short text of about 50 words for each of the languages will be enough, I'm just interested in basic statistics.
As far as I understand, it's quite possible that common abbreviations could have been encoded separately. I've checked the cipher tables from Francesco Tranchedino's list to get some understanding of which abbreviations might get their own codes. (I'm not suggesting these ciphers have anything to do with the Voynich Manuscript, I'm just trying to understand the way the plaintext would be tokenized before encoding.)
It appears that scribal abbreviations were used in the plaintext part of the cipher tables. E.g., I have trouble understanding the parts I circled below, what do these abbreviations stand for? Is there some good list of abbreviations? As far as I have seen, mostly people are referred to Cappelli for the scribal abbreviations, but there are probably hundreds of abbreviations in Cappelli's book, I'm mostly looking for a list of 5-10 most popular ones, like -9 for -us.
According to ChatGPT, the list of the most popular written languages in the XV century Europe is: Latin, Middle French, Middle High German, Middle English, Various Italian dialects (doesn't sound very helpful), Castilian, Middle Dutch.
Is this list reasonable? What about Greek and Arabic, were they used in parts of Europe at that time?
Could someone suggest a good resource to find samples of each of these language variants, preferably both transcribed and as a photo? I think a short text of about 50 words for each of the languages will be enough, I'm just interested in basic statistics.
As far as I understand, it's quite possible that common abbreviations could have been encoded separately. I've checked the cipher tables from Francesco Tranchedino's list to get some understanding of which abbreviations might get their own codes. (I'm not suggesting these ciphers have anything to do with the Voynich Manuscript, I'm just trying to understand the way the plaintext would be tokenized before encoding.)
It appears that scribal abbreviations were used in the plaintext part of the cipher tables. E.g., I have trouble understanding the parts I circled below, what do these abbreviations stand for? Is there some good list of abbreviations? As far as I have seen, mostly people are referred to Cappelli for the scribal abbreviations, but there are probably hundreds of abbreviations in Cappelli's book, I'm mostly looking for a list of 5-10 most popular ones, like -9 for -us.