How Many Common, Unique Letters Do *You* Think There Are?

[eggyk]

It presupposes that there is a plaintext and that there is a mapping from symbols to letters of the plaintext. The word "symbol" is also problematic, it presupposes that we can decompose Voynichese into a set of symbols with any confidence that the choices we made are correct. This is clearly not true.

When you say plaintext, do you mean the original content that the author could freely read? Or are you counting encoded text as "plaintext"?

If I write ELBL MJ LSII EEZFEIQM, which is a set of voynichese glyphs representing "ELBL MJ LSII EEZFEIQM" (which is ciphertext that would have to be deciphered), is that the "plaintext" in your view? 

Because in my view, the voynichese to latin letters in this example is not a mapping of voynichese glyphs to plaintext. Its a mapping of voynichese glyphs to ciphertext. None of this presupposes that "ELBL MJ LSII EEZFEIQM" would then undergo simple substitution to reveal the original plaintext. So why is simple substitution a valid reason to say that they cannot represent letters? A simple substitution to ciphertext is completely possible with what we know about the VMS, surely. 

Also, we clearly are able to seperate out certain voynichese symbols and differentiate at least some from some others. Whether we do that completely correctly, or whether we know we have done this completely correctly, has no bearing on whether it is truly the case.

We don't know if they are letters. We can't know if they represent letters. We therefore can't say that they are definitely not letters.