External text lookup

[R. Sale]

Isn't reproducibility relevant to time, place and the nature of the item: prayers, songs, poems, stories?

The author does his/her best at the time, and after that it's out of their control. Some things stay fixed, others mutate or get lost.

Arma virumque cano...

[Mark Knowles]

Isn't reproducibility relevant to time, place and the nature of the item: prayers, songs, poems, stories?

The author does his/her best at the time, and after that it's out of their control. Some things stay fixed, others mutate or get lost.

Arma virumque cano...

That I fear would be the difficulty. It is hard for me to think of a text that might not have been revised. Dante?? It would have to be some classic(or even classical?) text.

[-JKP-]

As an example text one could in a English context consider the Magna Carta, this is a well defined text. Or maybe the Lord's Prayer or some standard universal Christian text. Or standard political/governmental text like the Declaration of Independence.

Mark, you are describing a cipher system where the lookup in the external reference is used to decode each unit in the VMS. These kinds of ciphers definitely existed.

But I had something else in mind, something a bit simpler that existed in the early 15th century...


I have seen manuscripts where labels and numbers are used to reference information in other manuscripts (not a cipher, simply a reference). Bible verses are one obvious example (when they are paired with a concordance or canon table in another manuscript), but I have also seen it in other kinds of manuscripts.


In other words, you don't need the other reference to decode specific parts of the VMS—in fact, it wouldn't help in terms of reading the VMS text. You DO need to decode the VMS to see what the deciphered reference in the VMS points to in the external reference. For example, suppose a label next to a plant is a reference pointer rather than a plant name. It might refer to page xx in the external reference. The external reference might include additional information about the plant (or basic information about the plant if the VMS text does not provide that).

[Stephen Carlson]

As a simple example what if you select a word number in sequence from a text and the Voynich word was simply a number, which would fit neatly with positionality, I imagine. So ->

The Voynich word could be translate into 300 + 40 + 7
Which equal 347, so you can then find the 347th word in the text and substitute that. How does that method require a printed text?

Then you'd have to transmit your reference text along with your cipher text in order to read it. Printing is a way to convey the same text to two different people independent of the cipher text. But without printing, manuscripts of the same text didn't agree. Too much human error. A mistake in the first sentence would throw off all your counts.

[Mark Knowles]

As a simple example what if you select a word number in sequence from a text and the Voynich word was simply a number, which would fit neatly with positionality, I imagine. So ->

The Voynich word could be translate into 300 + 40 + 7
Which equal 347, so you can then find the 347th word in the text and substitute that. How does that method require a printed text?

Then you'd have to transmit your reference text along with your cipher text in order to read it. Printing is a way to convey the same text to two different people independent of the cipher text. But without printing, manuscripts of the same text didn't agree. Too much human error. A mistake in the first sentence would throw off all your counts.

That assumes two things that there could not have existed any standardised text at the time, but much more importantly given my own thinking that the cipher manuscript was being transmitted and was not purely for internal use. The cipher could just serve as an extra level of security should someone find or try to steal the manuscript rather than the manuscript being passed around. The reference text could then be kept separate from the Voynich manuscript and only brought out when the text was to be read.