f17r multispectral images

[oshfdk]

Recipe-like words in the marginalia would just be a method of obfuscation or a consequence of the active vocabulary of the author/scribe. For example, the author(s) got the encoding table, and wrote a short sequence where every third (or fifth or whichever) letter is part of the table and the rest are just random letters added to create some resemblance of meaning. If you are dealing with recipes, the random words you conjure up when trying to fill in the pattern created by the cipher table would be "so nim" and "gasmish", etc.

I like approaches like these - having some degrees of freedom when writing the filler text could explain a couple of statistics observed, and it would certainly look like gibberish and not obey many of the patterns of natural languages. I always wonder though, did they really intend to have a few sentences worth of text while writing whole paragraphs of filler text? And could this system be somehow extended or modified to the Labelese we all know and love?

I was referring specifically to the marginalia and not Voynichese. I don't think Voynichese is a (highly) verbose cipher. There could be some redundancy, but there are many quite short labels in the MS, a lot of them differ by just a single glyph, if these are meaningful, you can't have too many nulls per a meaningful character. I think Voynichese should be a quite simple to write (so that writing 240+ pages is feasible) one-to-many (which would explain apparent lack of clearly identifiable words from the image context) cipher, also preferably one that can be read off the page with no complex processing (otherwise it will make little sense to use it for a whole book). With these constraints there are not that many options actually. Also, though I'm much less certain about that, I like the idea that the specific choice of the cipher and the weird style of drawings were to hide the identity of the author and make it impossible to identify her/him from a sample of their handwriting/doodling. This would explain why the whole manuscript is encoded and there is not a single clear word in the plaintext language, other then a few marginalia, and the Latin letters in the marginalia are often distorted/unnatural.

Without digressing from the subforum's maintopic: Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's. "gas mich" actually stands out as being remarkably different from the rest of the words.

I'm not sure everyone agrees on which character is which in the marginalia, to begin with. Is there a piece of marginalia that has a universally accepted unambiguous reading?