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The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

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  • The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?
• The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

• The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  Emma May Smith > 12-02-2016, 09:17 PM

  I'm curious to know what the best arguments are for the Voynich manuscript being a cipher.
  
  I'm specifically interested in the thoughts of those who believe in a cryptological solution. What made you follow this path? What do you consider strong evidence for it?
  
  I'm most wanting the positive arguments rather than the negative ones: why it is a cipher rather than why it isn't one of the alternative solutions.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  -JKP- > 13-02-2016, 05:12 AM

  It would take a very strange person to add hundreds of pages of nonsense text to hundreds of carefully drawn illustrations. Even hoaxsters would find the task daunting and those perpetrating fraud are usually looking for a quick buck and would not have given so much attention to formatting.
  
  The text is not random, as some have suggested. It's very formulaic, but not in the same way as "random" text produced via formula.
  
  The content and format change in association with one another. Random, contrived text normally would not behave in this way.
  
  
  I don't believe it's a 1-to-1 substitution code, not only because it hasn't been solved yet by many very bright minds but because it's easier than even I realized to break them. I tackled a one-to-one code in an old manuscript recently and it didn't take more than 30 minutes to decode it and read all the coded text. So... 1-to-1 substitution codes are laughably easy to break, even by someone with zero cryptological experience. Obviously the VMS is something else.
  
  
  I think there's a possibility that what we see is not all of it. I'm not certain of this, but a piece of text might have to be matched with another piece of text elsewhere on the page, elsewhere in the manuscript, or in a list outside the manuscript. Even if this is not true, I think it's possible the codes are concepts rather than letters in the alphabetic sense.
  
  I think there's a strong possibility it's polyglot. Not only were medieval documents frequently combinations of a native tongue plus Latin, but that native tongue may have been a transitional language. Many old manuscripts have a mixture of Latin, Greek, Frankish and Germanic, for example. This makes it difficult to approach the text with computational attacks that are tied to specific language stats (like letter frequency or grammatical format).
  
  I think it might be heavily abbreviated as was common at the time.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  Diane > 13-02-2016, 07:42 PM

  I agree with JPK about its being an abbreviated text.  I'm not sure who first proposed the idea; I daresay it has been around for a while and proposed by different persons for different reasons.
  
  I decided it was probable because the imagery is so very condensed - and the manuscript is a size which suggests it was first meant to be carried about, and for that reason too a condensed text would make sense.
  
  As well as that, it 'works' as a condensed text.  After seeing Don Hoffmann's work, and Julian Bunn's, I tried a few different sorts of technical and abbreviated texts, and the text very happily meshed with all of them - yes *all*.
  
  So I think it's written in that style, and am happy to see that more people are coming to think the same - Don must be chuffed too, because I think he was the first to really work on the idea in any detail, and try to demonstrate it. I'm not convinced by his 'translation' but very much so by the model he has provided.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  Helmut Winkler > 14-02-2016, 10:03 AM

  There is no good reason to believe the VMs is a ciphre. Voynich said the VMs is Roger Bacon and it is ciphre. Both statements were wong, V. was a bookseller who tried to sell and needed a reason for a high price, but he was no scholar and he did not find one who confirme his views. The Bacon hypotheses is discredited and the cryptographers work according to the rule I have a hammer, the problem must be a nail. I have some experience with paleography medieval mss. and the VMs looks like a highly abbreviated medieval ms. and I thought so since I first saw it. I have seen somewhere a ms. from the Vaticana in the last few days which is a very good example for a ms. difficult not to read but to understand, there are other good examples like the Datini Archive or other archives from medieval towns.  And it is another fairy tale that it is written in an unknown script. The VMs is not unreadable, the trick is to find out what its meaning is.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  ReneZ > 14-02-2016, 11:29 AM

  Hello Helmut,
  
  the MS you saw is perhaps this one I mentioned at Nick's blog (Vat.Lat.869):
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  Another one, Pal.Lat. 330 was the topic of some correspondence between (probably) Th.Petersen
  and Anne Nill, though this looks far more common:
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  -Job- > 15-02-2016, 04:30 AM

  It can be difficult to separate a cipher from a constructed language.
  
  Maybe a better question would be, why is the Voynich Manuscript not a natural language?
  
  
  In any case, it's worth listing the features of the text that are suggestive of a cipher.
  
  Here are some that i've seen, in no particular order:
  
  Characters 'p' and 'f' are more likely to occur in a line already containing 'p' or 'f'.
  In some cases this results in fairly evident You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This feature is compatible with a cipher which operates on individual lines.
  
  
  The character entropy is relatively low.
  Low entropy is compatible with a verbose cipher.
  
  The word variability is high.
  For an example see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. High word variability is compatible with a cipher which employs null characters. It's also compatible with a code-book cipher, but that seems less likely.
  
  There are few repeated word sequences.
  Also compatible with a dynamic cipher which operates on individual lines.
  
  In some of these cases, a fairly sophisticated cipher would need to be employed, which is improbable at the time the VM was created.
  
  However it's worth mentioning that the usage of null characters can transform a simple substitution cipher into something that's extremely difficult to break.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  Emma May Smith > 15-02-2016, 09:36 AM

  (15-02-2016, 04:30 AM)-Job- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It can be difficult to separate a cipher from a constructed language.
  
  Maybe a better question would be, why is the Voynich Manuscript not a natural language?

  It's really not better to phrase it that way. I want positive reasons for the Voynich manuscript being a cipher. If folks' beliefs truly boil down to, "it's a cipher because I don't think it's a language", then I think the whole side of cipher research on the VM has a serious problem.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  Helmut Winkler > 15-02-2016, 09:42 AM

  (14-02-2016, 11:29 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello Helmut,
  
  the MS you saw ...

  
   HalloRene,
  
  thank you, that is the ms. I was talking about

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  Diane > 15-02-2016, 10:33 AM

  Helmut,
  
  Great to see someone interested in the Datini archive.  I've published a page from it, to show that a bill - as inventory - might have little pictures beside each item.  I think it offers a nice, if not precise, parallel for the 'pharma' sections, which btw I prefer to describe as the 'lading' section.
  
  Helmut, can you read Datini's writing?  I'd love to know more about some of those pages - does your blog turn up in 'Blogosphere'?  If so, I'll watch out for it.

• RE: The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher because...?

  ReneZ > 15-02-2016, 10:50 AM

  If it's a cipher, there would still be a meaningful language behind it.
  Depending on the complexity of the cipher, the text would be more or less different from the plain text.
  
  The problem I see is with the word 'cipher', since it has too restricted a meaning compared to what the person who wrote the MS may have been doing.
  
  Part of the question addressed here seems to be more about 'simple substitution', a very specific cipher.
  Those who are assigning sounds to the Voynich MS characters, and thus call it language, could also be considered to talk about a simple substitution...
  
  In any case, cipher and language should not be seen as mutually exclusive.
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