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A simple substitution experiment - Printable Version +- The Voynich Ninja (https://www.voynich.ninja) +-- Forum: Voynich Research (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-27.html) +--- Forum: Analysis of the text (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-41.html) +--- Thread: A simple substitution experiment (/thread-4930.html) Pages:
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A simple substitution experiment - ReneZ - 17-09-2025 As I was running some promising yet unsuccessful attempts to decode the Voynich MS text, I ran into the question: how difficult will it be to detect being 'close to' the solution? I decided to try something I had been thinking of on several occasions: Take a known plain text, and substitute vowels with other vowels and consonants with other consonants. Will the result be recognisable? To try this out, I took a part of Dante's Inferno, and changed the vowels and consonants from the Italian frequency distribution to the Latin frequency distribution. For these distributions, I used the ones obtained empirically on this page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the Dante and Mattioli source texts. Following is the conversion table: Code: E A I O U N R L T S C D M P V G H F B Q Z X J K
i e a u o t s r n m c l d p q b v f g h x y z kNote that the Italian text had two fewer consonants than the Latin text, so I added J and K to make them equal. Surprisingly, even though Italian and Latin are closely related, the conversion completely mixes up both vowels and consonants. The two questions I had were: - would the text be somehow recognisable? - would the text show any indication of being meaningful? The first is a definite no. The second is a bit more subjective, but I would also argue that it is: 'rather not'. As the text is a fully grammatical known text with only simple substitution applied, and it largely follows a reasonable single character frequency distribution, this means that 'just looking' isn't sufficient to decide whether one is close to a solution or not. A proper simple substitution solver (tool) should be used to test the result. Here follows a moderatly short part of the resulting text. If anyone wants a longer sample to play with, let me know. Quote:tir dixxu lir ceddat la tumnse qane RE: A simple substitution experiment - Jorge_Stolfi - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - tavie - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - ReneZ - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - oaken - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - oshfdk - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - oaken - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - ReneZ - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - oshfdk - 17-09-2025 RE: A simple substitution experiment - oshfdk - 17-09-2025 |