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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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

Imagine that I wanted to complicate the homophonic cipher with nulls by doing the following:
1). By assigning various numerical values to the letters
2). Marking vowels in words as two symbols separated by a space.
3). By distributing the letters within the word into anagrams.
4). And having created a second alphabet, he applied it to his own cipher wheel.

The more complicated the cipher, the harder it is to decode. The crypto camp has never been able to give a plausible justification for why the Author would have felt it necessary to encrypt a whole book like the VMS with a military-grade cipher.  If it is indeed a herbal, why make it so hard to read?  If it is some dangerous "heretic" text, why waste all that vellum with those supposedly "decoy" images that would only attract the attention of the "inquisitors"?

And, anyway, it is unlikely that a complex cipher would produce a text with all those properties that we see in the VMS, that are characteristic of a natural language -- vocabulary size, Zipf-like word frequencies, ~10 bits of entropy per word, a common core vocabulary plus section-specific words, single-word labels, etc.  

For instance, an encryption that used  null letters or a position-dependent letter mapping like Vigenère would result in one word type W becoming several distinct word types W[1], W[2], W[3]...; and that would usually destroy the Zipf property.  To preserve it, the encryption method should be such that each alternative W[k] is chosen with a different probability that is just right.

Also, this argument “they would have cracked it long ago” doesn’t work. For example, there’s Cryptos — a somewhat more complex version of the Vigenère cipher. The last text on the tablet hasn’t been deciphered yet (even with the clues).

A Vigenère cipher and other position-dependent letter substitution schemes are much harder to crack than position-independent letter substitution or scrambling scheme.  But they have the above problem.

There are Bale’s cryptograms. One of the texts was cracked manually (!), and in our world of technology, it would be a piece of cake to crack it. Maybe it’s not a cipher after all?

The Bale ciphers are a codebook cipher, using some other text as the code book.  To crack the other two letters one must guess which text was used as the code book. 

But they stink of a con job from miles away...

All the best, --stolfi