Could the Voynich Author Be a "Ramanujan-style" Anomaly?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

a letter substitution cipher with homophones and nulls, plus some abbreviations

Why can’t Voynichese be it?

For one thing, because such a cipher would have been cracked long ago.  

But also because the encrypted text would not have the statistics and word structure of Voynichese.   

I know of only two encryption schemes that could do that: a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and the Naibbe cipher.  Both are rather laborious to encode and decode.  The latter is also very inefficient -- it uses 6x as much time and vellum as any reasonable cipher.  And it is not clear how one could be sure to obtain a Zip-compliant text with it.

Furthermore, in order to produce the Voynichese word structure, both of those methods require complicated rules with no visible justification.  A codebook cipher with ordinary Arabic or Roman numbers would be just as hard to crack as one whose numbers fit the Voynichese word model.  A Naibbe cipher would be just as safe and (in)efficient if it used simpler prefixes, midfixes, and postfixes, together with some nulls.

All the best, --stolfi