The Naibbe cipher

[magnesium]

Not as it stands, but maybe a variant on it could.  The playing-card mechanism is designed to impose a frequency ratio among choices from the different tables, and it's good at accomplishing that -- but, applied strictly as described, it would also create flat ciphertexts with none of the regional variation we know and love from our holidays on Tavie's island.

There could be arbitrary rules such as (1) when encoding the first line of a paragraph, draw from this table; (2) when encoding the first vord of a line, draw from that table; (3) when encoding the last vord of a line, draw from that other table.  But that doesn't strike me as a very satisfying solution, since it doesn't offer any real explanation for such a practice.

I think there is a problem with adding more and more rules. But first I have to say that the below is in not way an attempt to devalue the work on the Naibbe cipher, but just my perspective. 

The general methodological (?) problem I sense in the whole approach: if one sets out to replicate particular features, one would likely end up replicating these features, nothing less, nothing more. Given a simple analogy, if I get an F1 car and set myself on a mission to replicate its appearance as closely as possible, using modeling clay and scrap metal, then if I'm careful and accurate, I will end up with a very good replica, quite suitable for photo shoots, but I won't expect to learn a lot about what makes the F1 car a racetrack marvel.

It would be, for me personally, much more interesting find if the features of the Voynichese emerge due to some internal logic and simple constraints of an efficient encoding system. magnesium's cipher is a very good approximation and an excellent work at that, but at a cost of quite high verbosity and still quite complicated encoding/decoding process. Totally achievable with the tools available in the XV century, yes, but what would be the motivation to use this scheme?

So, yes, it's possible to add LAAFU rules and nulls, etc, etc and it is in the end quite possible to achieve a perfect replica of Voynichese. But as long as it is done by arbitrarily adding rules, I'm not sure one will learn much about the actual Voynichese.

No offense taken whatsoever. I'd encourage folks to interpret the Naibbe cipher as a reference. The model very explicitly averages across all of Voynich B, and there is considerable section-by-section variation within that portion of the text. I tried to get the cipher to a point, though, where it replicated enough that its modes of failure would be interesting. In addition, there's only so much I can do—or know how to do. So I decided to develop the cipher to the point where it did a lot of things—but not everything—very reliably and then pivoted to rigorously characterizing the properties of the resulting ciphertext. To riff on your F1 analogy: You can actually learn a lot about the aerodynamics of a car based on a clay model.

I'm beginning a follow-up analysis where I parse Voynich B as if it were literally a Naibbe ciphertext (it's not!), which yields the exact sequence of plaintext n-grams and table assignments that would have to be made to replicate the ~83% of Voynich B tokens the cipher can create. How do the properties of the implied re-spacing sequence and the table sequence vary line by line, page by page, or section by section? It's still very early days, but there are meaningful section-by-section differences in the percentage of inferred unigrams, and Scribe 2 seems to prefer writing strings of multiple inferred unigrams in a row. I'd love help with this sort of thing and would welcome people taking the cipher and running with it.