There are over 100 encrypted books:
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some solved, some unsolved. But how do you know when you have actually solved it? There are so many solutions to the VMS that I may have to take off my shoes and socks to count them...and each one of these 10+ persons "solving" it thought his/her solution was correct. How do you know for sure?

Hi, All:

I wanted to bring this dissertation to the group's attention:

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Cultural Uses of Magic in Fifteenth Century England by Laura T Mitchell

I will start with the disclaimers -- yes, it's England and yes, it discusses "magic" (lots of focus on charms) and yes, I know that both of these are big question marks when it come to the Voynich (e.g., we don't know "where" and we don't know "what").

But here is the value I found in this scholarship:  The manuscripts that she discusses are concrete examples of theories that have been put forth for the Voynich.

After doing a general survey of magic in manuscripts in England (very interesting, but maybe not applicable for the disclaimers discussed above) she moved on to the focused manuscript topics I found quite useful.

She takes several different manuscripts produced in the general time period of the carbon dating and discusses reasoning behind WHY they were produced and what aspects of the manuscripts, in a very broad sense, she used to discern these motivations.

The first is a manuscript produced as a collective effort by a "lower gentry household", the Holdenby or Haldenby family (see, Chapter 2). 

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It doesn't "look like" the Voynich, but it was made with vellum and with multiple hands (10!).  Colophons indicate that various family members were involved.  

This is a concrete example of the "communal book" theory in practice. 

Mitchell talks about copying outside of monasteries, the role of book ownership and social status, the role of "wonder" in the Middle Ages, and the role of secrets and concludes:
 
"The actual knowledge contained inside the book was often secondary to the air of authority gained by possessing it in the first place." (p. 99)

Now I know this is something often assumed in the Voynich community -- but it was helpful to me to see it in a work of scholarship.  An aside: Interestingly, the most blatant reference to "charms" had been erased, but can be seen under UV light.

The next chapter discusses another concrete example commonly discussed in relation to the Voynich -- the personal notebook.   Now this one is paper and has only one hand and hasn't been digitized, but there are interesting discussions of the personality of the (unknown) owner based on the magical content.  So this has less to do with the Voynich on the surface, at least, but it was interesting.  I'm not sure I agree completely with the whole connection between "masculine" identity and ownerships of manuscripts idea (which is just discussed by Mitchell, this is the primary work of Frank Klasssen -- but I haven't read the background scholarship (role of nude nymphs, anyone?).

Next, there is a chapter for a manuscript discussing the physician (or charlatan) reference as well as the "advertising" theory.  Because of the colophon, the owner and the scribe are both known.  The owner was likely a "part-time" physician.  The scribe was a law student/teacher in training.  Interestingly, Mitchell states that if scribes are hired, this was the most costly part of the book making process, more expensive than the materials (see page 169).  Mitchell discusses how the unusual colophon functioned as an advertisement for both the physician and the scribe.  Link to some pages:


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An aside: This is a (the?) source of the famous colophon quote: 
Nunc scripsi totum pro christo da mihi potum. (Now that I have written the whole for Christ; give me a drink.)

TL/DR:  The PhD thesis by Laura Mitchell discusses manuscripts from 15th century England that personify theories about the "psychology" of the Voynich.  It is readable and well researched -- recommended! 

I havent looked at the plants much lately but today two of them caught my eye. Don't know if similar ids have been made before, if so, i agree. 

How do we know if a vord is broken across lines?

There are numerous places in the VMS where the y glyph is at the beginning of a vord.

There are also numerous places where the q glyph is at the beginning.

Sometimes there is a glyph that resembles the Latin letter "q". It has a rounded front and straight descender. It is sometimes transliterated as y. It is sometimes transliterated as q if it is followed by "o".


I have often wondered if this "q" glyph is a slip by the scribe (maybe the scribe was thinking "q" and accidentally wrote it out of habit). I have also wondered if it is a separate glyph (an uncommon one). It sometimes also occurs at the ends of words, in the position where we often see y.

Here is a piece of evidence (not very strong evidence since this is rare) that mystery-q MIGHT be a separate glyph. This vord includes both the mystery-q and the y written as one vord ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 11):

   

I have experimentally measured the Levenshtein distance between the first and last word of each line.

My hope was to see a pattern, but it didn't turn out that way. Values below 3 are rather rare and they appear random.

It is often said that the Voynich cannot be written in cipher as a 600 years old cipher would have been deciphered by modern cryptography by now.

However it seems to me that in practice it is very easy to create a "simple" cipher which is very hard to crack. For those familiar with Nick Pelling's Cipher Mysteries website it is apparent that there are lots of ciphers from different periods in time, though none as old as the Voynich, that haven't yet been cracked.

If I was creating a hard to crack cipher I would start with a preponderance of filler text, the more filler the harder to crack. However it would be interesting to see how others might go about producing a difficult to crack "simple" cipher.

(When I use the term "simple" cipher I mean one based on simple techniques or ideas. I don't mean modern ciphers based on modern mathematical techniques.)

What does it mean to decipher a writing system? (see J. Gelb in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 1975)

- How does a script work? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- How difficult is it to decipher an unknown script using an unidentified language? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- What is a writing system? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- What different kinds of writing systems did we know? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)


The glyphs

- Are there different variants of the same glyph?
- It is is possible to distinguish between different types of glyphs?
   - Are there uppercase and lowercase variants? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- Are there any corrections? It it possible to describe patterns for them?
- How many glyphs does exist?
- How to determine the type of the writing system? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- If it is an alphabetic script, is it possible to distinguish between consonants and vowels?


Repeated glyph groups

- Are glyphs squeezed together at the end of lines?
- How to determine the writing direction?
- Are there groups of glyphs that do repeat?
- Does the script use some kind of separator to group the glyphs into graphemes?
- If there are separators, how does the length of the graphemes distribute?
- Are there longer groups of glyphs that do repeat?


Relations between graphemes (other terms for graphemes are glyph groups or words)

- What is highly characteristic for the writing system? Are there any unexpected patterns?
- Did graphemes depend on their context?
- Did graphemes depend on illustrations?
- Did graphemes depend on other graphemes?
- Can a grapheme be part of another grapheme?
- Did relations between similar graphemes exists? 
- Is it possible to determine prefixes or suffixes?
- Is it possible to determine root forms?
- Is it possible to distinguish between different grapheme classes?
- If there are different grapheme classes, is it possible to describe relations between them?


The meaning encoded in the writing (A common mistake is to start with this question. But it is necessary to determine the way the writing system works first!)

- Is the writing system related to anything we know?
- Is there a relation to other known writing systems?
- Is there a bilingual text?
- How many script samples of different origin did we know?
- Does the writing system encode meaning? (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- Does the writing system encode a natural language?
- What does we know about the cultural context the writing system was used in?
- Is it possible to detect the language family?
- Is it possible to detect a related langue or to detect even the language itself?
- Are there further tracks we can research?

In number of words or characters? What short story or novella would it roughly correspond to?
And BTW, how would the Rohonc Codex and the Codex Seraphinianus rank on this scale?

There is an unpublished article from Stephen Wells-Bennett about the VMS: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."

The author says he was inspired by the book "Forgotten Scripts" by Cyrus H. Gordon: "In this book the author describes practical approaches and methods to code breaking that have worked successfully in the past.Simply put these are finding the right point of entry into a text, making an educated guess and thirdly luck! The author also advises would be code breakers not be too concerned about the minutiae of deciphering texts as most proposed solutions will get improved and refined because more people will study them once they are published" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 2).