24-06-2025, 04:08 PM
I will be presenting more on this at the upcoming Voynich Manuscript Day, but many of the properties that Torsten Timm and Jorge Stolfi discuss within this thread can be reliably achieved via a substitution cipher of the right construction encrypting a natural language like Latin. However, in my opinion, the biggest outstanding challenge the ciphertext hypothesis faces is a mechanism that often, reliably generates and/or preserves the text's long-range correlations during encryption.
There are multiple hypothetical ways in which these correlations could be induced. For example, Matlach, Janečková, and Dostál (2022) suggests that simple habit and regular line-by-line reuse of glyphs within a proposed steganographic cipher could induce correlations over long ranges. If the cipher itself permits glyph or word reuse, then correlations become easier to achieve. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's also worth noting that the construction of the VMS may itself help induce these correlations. The VMS is a series of quires made, in turn, of nested bifolia. If the plaintext contents of the VMS were roughly laid out ahead of time, and then encryption (unusually) proceeded on the basis of the bifolio—not in sequential, narrative page order—then the first and last pages of a given quire would be encrypted closer in time together than the first and second pages of the quire. If patterns of non-random word reuse were established during the encryption of a given bifolio, that could then mean that there is non-random correlation in word choice between the first and last pages of a quire, potentially thousands of words apart, and so on and so forth for the 4 pages within a given quire that are part of the same shared bifolio.
All that said, if the VMS is a ciphertext, its observed long-range correlations would be much easier to explain if the plaintext itself had meaningful long-range correlations, even if the encryption procedure itself can induce them on its own.
There are multiple hypothetical ways in which these correlations could be induced. For example, Matlach, Janečková, and Dostál (2022) suggests that simple habit and regular line-by-line reuse of glyphs within a proposed steganographic cipher could induce correlations over long ranges. If the cipher itself permits glyph or word reuse, then correlations become easier to achieve. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's also worth noting that the construction of the VMS may itself help induce these correlations. The VMS is a series of quires made, in turn, of nested bifolia. If the plaintext contents of the VMS were roughly laid out ahead of time, and then encryption (unusually) proceeded on the basis of the bifolio—not in sequential, narrative page order—then the first and last pages of a given quire would be encrypted closer in time together than the first and second pages of the quire. If patterns of non-random word reuse were established during the encryption of a given bifolio, that could then mean that there is non-random correlation in word choice between the first and last pages of a quire, potentially thousands of words apart, and so on and so forth for the 4 pages within a given quire that are part of the same shared bifolio.
All that said, if the VMS is a ciphertext, its observed long-range correlations would be much easier to explain if the plaintext itself had meaningful long-range correlations, even if the encryption procedure itself can induce them on its own.