How to decipher the MS?

[oshfdk]

I think this approach is sensible. My impression is that, at the moment, we are not in a position to apply this to the Voynich manuscript, since we have no realistic candidate for the mechanics of the cipher. To have any hope at all, the candidate should explain all the properties of Voynichese.

I think "explain all the properties" is a bit restrictive. It should be compatible with these properties, but we have no idea which of the properties emerge from the mechanics or the cipher, which ones appear because of the features of the plaintext and which ones are just stylistic preferences of the scribe.

Also as I found out in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it could be possible to decipher a message without fully understanding the mechanics of the cipher. Just uncovering some random 10% of the plaintext using the most frequent combinations, can be enough to prove that the text is meaningful and open the way to reverse engineer the rest of the cipher.

For example, imagine that the Naibbe cipher was used to encode the Voynich MS, but we didn't know that. So, we just isolated the most common substrings and ran the decoding matching just these elements to Latin bigrams/trigrams, then with some probability we'll get most of the first table of the Naibbe scheme, that corresponds to 5/13 of the plaintext. If we uncover 5/13 of the plaintext, it would be immediately obvious that there are a lot of coherent grammatically correct snippets, too many for this to be coincidental. With this we can get enough context to deduce the rest of the scheme. Only after that we will be able to identify the way the statistics of the Voynichese emerge from the Naibbe cipher.