-JKP- > 30-01-2018, 02:18 AM
Quote:Morten St George:
Per my investigations, the VMS was decoded between late 1585 and 1589 somewhere in Protestant-controlled Europe, possibly in Nérac, France, under the protection of King Henry of Navarre.
Morten St. George > 30-01-2018, 06:13 AM
(30-01-2018, 02:10 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:Speculations. The VMS glyphs might represent numbers similar to how the Hebrew glyphs do, and perhaps even the same numbers. Thus, each glyph would correspond to a number. Imagine a sequence of glyphs (numbers) as follows: 2 + 60 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 3. These numbers add up to 100, and 1 + 0 + 0 add up to 1, Aleph, or be it, the Latin letter "a". And that's how a large number of VMS glyphs can reduce into a smaller number of Latin letters. I'm not making this up. It was standard cabala procedure incorporated into their Gematria.
The gematria angle has been explored countless of times by many different researchers (including me).
I was aware of kabbalah before I knew about the VMS so, of course, it was one of the first things I tried.
Reducing "a large number of VMS glyphs... into a smaller number of Latin letters" is not going to result in anything very intelligible because the VMS glyph-count is already somewhat restrained. Read some of the threads on entropy.
I haven't excluded the possibility of some kind of numeric system, I think it's possible, but I don't think it's based on gematria specifically. Not only is gematria not an "encryption" system (it's intended to find correspondences between "special" words, not for enciphering blocks of text), but it's impractical to read back if it is applied to every word (it leans dangerously toward one-way cipher territory).
davidjackson > 30-01-2018, 06:43 AM
Morten St. George > 30-01-2018, 07:45 AM
(30-01-2018, 06:43 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a logical flaw in gemetria encryption, as I have pointed out before on many occasions and JKP pointed out above: it's impossible to decrypt.
Gematria works on the premise that the letters of the alphabet can also be used as numbers, and therefore words and phrases acquire distinctive numerical values. Those words and phrases can thus be considered to be "equal".
Let us assume an English equivalent, where each letter of the alphabet is assigned a numeric value corresponding to its position in the alphabet (a=1,b=2....z=26) and encode a word to see how this works.
MR
13 +18 = 31
V O Y N I C H
22+15+25+14+9+3+8 = 96
Now we have several different ways of "encoding" this.
Traditional gemetria would use the value 96 to find other words that have the value of 96 and substitute them for VOYNICH.(Another way is to add 96+31 together and cast about for a word that equals 127, but I'll take the first route). So, KNOWLEDGE, FREEMASON, TURTLE and APHRODITE all total 96.
And CHIEF, FALL, BELL, MALE all total 31.
So..... we can "encode" MR VOYNICH into CHIEF TURTLE or MALE FREEMASON as all three phrases are "equivalent" under the rules of gemetria.
OK, that's encoded with gemetria. I leave the task of decrypting ALABAMA, I CHANGE NOT into the plain text as an exercise for the reader.*
* SOLUTION: Mr Voynich. But how can you be sure I didn't mean CHIEF TURTLE or MALE FREEMASON?
Koen G > 30-01-2018, 07:48 AM
davidjackson > 30-01-2018, 01:31 PM
Quote:I think you are ignoring the 3 to 1 ratios that I indicated.
Quote:moving across from left to right, every three glyphs converts to one letter (or blank space or punctuation mark).Some maths gives us the answer. Let a,b,c be natural numbers >= 0. How many combinations of a,b,c be there so that a+b+c = 13?
As you say, 13 is M. There are dozens of ways of arriving at 13 with three glyphs (eg. 10+2+1, 2+10+1, 5+5+3, 4+8+1, etc. etc) but as long as you know the numerical value of each glyph, it can be done quickly.
Let’s now suppose the second letter is a A. There are three possibilities, 0+0+1, 0+1+0, and 1+0+0, to get 1. So there you have, in a matter of seconds, we have MA and continue on.
farmerjohn > 30-01-2018, 02:51 PM
(30-01-2018, 01:31 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:I think you are ignoring the 3 to 1 ratios that I indicated.
OK, let us try the thought experiment that you suggest:
Quote:moving across from left to right, every three glyphs converts to one letter (or blank space or punctuation mark).Some maths gives us the answer. Let a,b,c be natural numbers >= 0. How many combinations of a,b,c be there so that a+b+c = 13?
As you say, 13 is M. There are dozens of ways of arriving at 13 with three glyphs (eg. 10+2+1, 2+10+1, 5+5+3, 4+8+1, etc. etc) but as long as you know the numerical value of each glyph, it can be done quickly.
Let’s now suppose the second letter is a A. There are three possibilities, 0+0+1, 0+1+0, and 1+0+0, to get 1. So there you have, in a matter of seconds, we have MA and continue on.
Since a,b,c can be repeated (ie, 9+2+2) then this is just a combination problem. The solution is given by C(13,3) = 455 combinations of glyphs.
First off, let me note that there are fewer than 30 Voynich glyphs - there are aprox (ignoring the weirdoes) as many glyphs as letters in a European alphabet.
So we need to assume that there is a one on one correspondence going on; that is, that both languages have the same gemetria system.
Voynichese glyphs are very highly positional aware - they tend to appear in the same positions and correspondences. I would say that it is impossible for you to find more than 400 different combinations to write the glyph which is equivalent to M.
davidjackson > 30-01-2018, 03:43 PM
Morten St. George > 30-01-2018, 10:42 PM
(30-01-2018, 03:43 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Ah yes, sorry, it's been a while. That's still a lot of combinations!
davidjackson > 31-01-2018, 06:08 PM