Why Voynichese doesn't have cribs?

[Rafal]

If it is a one to many cipher, where a plaintext word can have many possible encodings

Yes, it is a point. Let me develop it further.

Actually when speaking about one to many cipher you may mean two things which are a bit similar and a bit different

1) homophonic cipher
2) polyalphabetic cipher

1) Homophonic cipher assigns many symbols to one plain letter but the symbols always mean the same:


In the example above there are 3 symbols for "O" but "4" always means "O"

I believe we can safely say that Voynich isn't homophonic cipher. These things have much more symbols than regular alphabet and Voynichese is the opposite - it has fewer symbols than alphabet if we ignore very rare and unsure stuff.

2) Polyalphabetic cipher on the other hand may use the same amount of symbols or fewer than the alphabet but symbols have different meaning depending on their context. It is actually "many to many" cipher and not "one to many". An example would be Vigenere cipher: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

So yes, Voynichese could be polyaphabetic cipher which would be very anachronistic but there were stranger things under the Sun