Positional Mimic Cipher (PM-Cipher)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I’m not comparing raw Vietnamese (or natural languages) against Voynich with JSD. All my JSD results for the cipher are EVA vs EVA.

Ops, sorry, I skipped the beginning of the thread.  

So you are varying the encoding table, attempting to get the same digraph statistics as the VMS?

It would be notable if you can do that.  However, I would question your assumption that the plaintext was in Latin and in the "standard" spelling system.  

The distribution of lexeme (word type) lengths seems to be incompatible with the source language being Latin or any Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, or Turkic language, if the encoding approximately preserves the length of words.  A Semitic language (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic,Ge'ez, Berber, etc) seems more compatible, since it should have root words limited to 3-4 consonants, but it stll may require a non-standard splitting of articles and affixes ("walaalddallin"  -> "wala al ddalin").

Moreover, in ciphers of the time it seems that it was common to encode digraphs like "ch" and doubled consonants like "ss" and "cc" as single letters, because otherwise they could be keys for cracking the encryption.

But do let's see how close one can get to the digraph distribution even apart from those objections.

All the best, --jorge