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DonaldFisk · 19-03-2019, 09:41 PM

(19-03-2019, 02:17 PM)geoffreycaveney wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In case people are curious about how I identified the plaintext for Don's ciphertext, it was a little bit of cryptography and a lot of philology. By philology I mean "relentless online research". Since I had mentioned 14th and 15th centuries and then Don clarified "within a century of the ms parchment dating", that pretty much gave away that it had to be an early 16th century text. So I found a very convenient list of them here:
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Eventually of course I arrived at Machiavelli and The Prince. Now the English Wikipedia only has links to English translations:
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But the Italian Wikipedia page for this work is more useful:
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And at the bottom of the page, it says, "Wikisource contiene il testo completo de Il Principe"
And from here it is a few more clicks to the text I was seeking:
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Whereupon one finds the text of the beginning of Il Principe.
And by connecting the repetition of "tutti" with the repetition of phrases at the beginning of Don's ciphertext, it is immediately clear that this has to be the plaintext.

I analysed Italian using precisely that text, here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and I got the idea of two letters per Voynichese word from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..