Delta Cipher

[oshfdk]

I was wondering what the current status is of the hypothesis that Voynichese is a delta cipher, in other words, the idea that it is the transition from one word to the next that encodes information -- which characters are dropped and added and where, etc. This could encode plaintext letters or the numbers of an intermediate Polybius Square. I know papers like those of Timm and Schinner looked at word similarity in transitions, but I couldn't tell the degree to which this sort of encoding was ruled out. I also would have expected modern professional cryptography to have cracked it by now if this were the case, but perhaps I have too much faith in that.

Hi,

I'm not sure any encoding scheme has been conclusively ruled out, but some of them, like simple substitution, only seem possible in a combination with a very exotic language or very strange plaintext.

I'm not even sure how one can "rule out" an encoding scheme without any idea of what the plaintext should look like.

I think there have been a few discussions of ciphers that employ character-to-character transitions to encode information, for example: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.