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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and the Naibbe cipher

It sounds something like “I don’t know of anything more suitable for a VMS text than nonsense.”

The SPS=SBJ claim aside, I still see many arguments indicating that the VMS is NOT nonsense.  But I have also see many reasons to believe that it is NOT encrypted either.  Including those I posted above.

Ignorance doesn’t mean that [an encryption with the required proeprties] doesn’t exist. Perhaps the author was just a bit more perceptive than you.

The encryption method must generate a text whose "words" have the known "multi-slot" structure, the observed compact length distribution, and the observed Zipf-like frequency distribution, with some words specific to each section or page while others are more or less equally common in all sections.  

These requirements mostly rule out alphabet substitution ciphers, including those with one-to-many letter maps and nulls.  

A codebook cipher is possible because it would preserve the word frequencies and correlations of the original text, and generate compact "words", but would eliminating any glyph-to-letter correlations (thus making the encryption resistant to the methods used to crack substitution ciphers).  However, the word codes should have the multi-slot structure we observe.  Which excludes a positional number system, but allows a system similar to Roman numerals.

Another alternative is an encryption which does not preserve the original word divisions; that is, which hides the original inter-word spaces and inserts new ones.  The Naibbe cipher is an extreme example where each letter is encoded as a separate word.  It could also be a similar scheme using syllables instead of letters.  But, besides the practical problems that I mentioned in the previous post, the letter or syllable encoding method would have to yield "words" with the properties that we see in the VMS, including the vocabulary size, the compact word length distribution, the slot structure, and the Zipf-like "word" frequencies.  These properties seem unlikely to be satisfied by lucky accident; they seem to require deliberate non-trivial rules in the encryption method.  But 1450 was still a couple of centuries before the invention of statistics and the discovery of Zipf's law...

All the best, --stolfi

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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. 

In know 3

OK...   
All the best, --stolfi