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Some suggestions and theories
- Some suggestions and theories
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RE: Some suggestions and theories
Jorge_Stolfi > 13-06-2026, 07:24 PM
(13-06-2026, 10:01 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.we have no reason to think he was a shipwrecked Indian writing in Malayalam
He was not Indian, he was born in Madagascar, and wrote in Malagasy (sorry for the typo). He learned the Malayalam script from his mother, who was a Mappila from Kozhikode working as a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at the Sakalava court.
Quote:the Northern Italian/Bohemian region where the parchment was fabricated (not to mention that he had a magic box full of Taccola, Kyeser and Duc de Berry manuscripts)
The parchment was manufactured wherever it was in the 1400. It was bought in Bohemia by the Counts Rozemberk, lingered in their vellum discards box in for a century if two, until their guest John Dee bought it together with a dozen books from their library, before going back to England. The box was not magical, just sturdy and waterproof.
Quote:And by a stroke of unimaginable luck, happened to come back with the book to the exact same Northern Italian/Bohemian region)
He never set foot in Central Europe. After his rescuer took him to Spain, he enrolled again as a sailor aboard a Genoese merchant ship plying the Rome-Barcelona route. In one of the stays in Rome he went sightseeing and lost his cherished Book of Dreams somewhere. We now can tell that it was at or near Villa Torlonia -- because, about a hundred years later, the book was found under a closet by a Jesuit, who assumed it was the long-lost book mentioned in Marci's letter, which he then took out of the box of unbound Kircher's correspondence and attacked to the book, and filed the latter among the books absconded from the Collegio Romano in 1860.
I know that this last part is hard to believe; but improbable things do happen sometimes.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Some suggestions and theories
SpamBot > 14-06-2026, 12:24 PM
(12-06-2026, 08:48 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Voynichese itself is not a full-fledged language. The theory of an artificial language also falls away - it is too redundant. However, it can still be a modified language (German, Occitan, Bavarian, Chinese, etc.).
Any encryption (except for compression, but here it's very unlikely) is a bijective function preserving orientation (while encoded string "ABC" can be rotated in multiplies of 45deg or even reflected, the 'B' would still be between 'A' and 'C' in the output; otherwise we would have more than 1 encryption/decryption for the same piece of information) between 2 sets of (groups of) symbols, therefore any encrypted text can be cracked by a simple bruteforce. While it may look impossible with the current technology (for a set with 30 [and since the manuscipt doesn't contain punctuation and numerical symbols the actual number is going to be bigger] symbols checking all 30! bijective functions would take 100s of years on a PC capable of doing 10^9 ops/sec), we can take just 2 different words (preferably from different pages) containing the same symbols and try to crack them instead: if words are of length, for ex. 5, then we don't need more than A(50, 5) checks (50 is a random upper limit on a size of alphabet + symbols), which is very manageable. If 2 words we get this way belong to the same language (ancient Italian?) - we likely cracked the code. It's a simple trick, so I assumed that someone already tried it and it failed (none of the known languages had the resulting words). Then what other conclusion, except for existence of Voynichese, can we derive from it? Besides, the only structural difference between encrypted and unknown language is that unknown language may have unique grammar rules (like those which omit punctuation symbols). However methods of translation and decryption differ: translated are words, not symbols.
Also, how many other encrypted books (not letters, messages etc.) are there? But how many are written on a foreign language? -
RE: Some suggestions and theories
ololololo > 14-06-2026, 12:32 PM
Your remarks is correct.
You can read my post about the numeric cipher, as I am currently studying it.
(14-06-2026, 12:24 PM)SpamBot Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.how many other encrypted books (not letters, messages etc.) are there?
For example, Codex Copiale, encrypted by a simple substitution with nulls. -
RE: Some suggestions and theories
Mauro > 14-06-2026, 05:29 PM
(14-06-2026, 12:24 PM)SpamBot Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. While it may look impossible with the current technology (for a set with 30 [and since the manuscipt doesn't contain punctuation and numerical symbols the actual number is going to be bigger] symbols checking all 30! bijective functions would take 100s of years on a PC capable of doing 10^9 ops/sec)
I think you're underestimating the sheer magnitude of 30!. It's ~2.65 *10^32. A computer able to check 10^9 bijective functions/sec (which is a lot faster than doing 10^9 ops/sec) will take 2.65 * 10^23 seconds to check them all, that is to say ~5 * 10^16 years, or 5 * 10^14 100s of years. About 3.8 million times the current age of the universe. -
RE: Some suggestions and theories
oshfdk > 14-06-2026, 09:07 PM
(14-06-2026, 12:24 PM)SpamBot Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Any encryption (except for compression, but here it's very unlikely) is a bijective function preserving orientation (while encoded string "ABC" can be rotated in multiplies of 45deg or even reflected, the 'B' would still be between 'A' and 'C' in the output; otherwise we would have more than 1 encryption/decryption for the same piece of information) between 2 sets of (groups of) symbols, therefore any encrypted text can be cracked by a simple bruteforce.
I'm not sure I understand these statements. There is nothing unusual or anachronistic with having multiple ways to encrypt the same message, as long as the decryption is unique. Most diplomatic ciphers worked this way with letter variants. And homophonic polyphonic ciphers also allow multiple decryptions, with the right one only clear from the context.
Also, any cipher that produces out of order pieces can change ABC to ACB:
For example, I can encode this message:
SUPPOSE I WRITE ALL ODD CHARACTERS FROM THE LEFT TO THE RIGHT AND ALL THE EVEN ONES FROM THE RIGHT TO THE LEFT
by keeping each odd letter and removing each even letter and writing them from the end of the line towards the center:
SPOEIWIEALODCAATR RMTELF OTERGTADALTEEE NSFO H IH OTELFTE H TTGRETMR EONV H L N HI H TTE H OFSECRH D L TR SPU
I'm not even sure how to analyze this in terms of ABC, it's mostly scrambled. And encoding this on a piece of paper is a breeze, just keep writing one letter at a time taking turns at the beginning and the end of the line. -
RE: Some suggestions and theories
oshfdk > 15-06-2026, 08:52 AM
(15-06-2026, 08:31 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You mean polyphonic.
Yes, confusion is my middle name
And don't get me started on bigram/conditional entropy, I don't think there was a single time when I used the term correctly on the first try.
Thank you! -
RE: Some suggestions and theories
Stefan Wirtz_2 > 15-06-2026, 05:00 PM
(13-06-2026, 06:03 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We all know by now that you're absolutely convinced it comes from the East and that you categorically reject anything that doesn't fit your theory. But where can one actually find information about the background of your theory?
Funny turn.
It is not a „theory“ to remark that many „researchers“ stick to the Alpine origin without any good reasons and reject to consider other directions of Europe, i.e. the East, or as well the North.
So I have no special „theory“ about a point of origin where something has or has not to fit to — but everybody should keep in mind that many of VMS‘s strange details would also fit to works from Riga, Novgorod or even Trapezunt…
But if you want to: just check, for example, Claudette Cohen‘s approach to VMS. She is only indirectly mentioned here in the „solutions“ list (which provides enough examples for failed „westeuropean“ theories); even though CC stumbled at bit over Old Norse already and never made it really to finno-ugric systematics, she showed some things that are quite more important than Ellie Velinska‘s findings — without any intention of reducing EV’s work.