Voynichese is a numeric cipher?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Well, I still don’t really understand how it works (according to this logic, vords are plaintext words, or what?),

Each card has a plaintext word and its code in the hypothetical "Voynichese number system".  

For instance, if the Author started to encode Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

• In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
  

with an empty box, the first few cards could be

• In ol
  
• the al
  
• beginning or
  
• universe ar
  
• was chol
  
• created chal
  
• this chor
  
• has char
  
• made shol
  
• a shal
  
• lot shor
  
• of shar
  
• people dain
  
• very oldain
  
• and aldain
  
• angry ordain
  
• been ardain
  
• widely choldain
  
• regarded chaldain
  
• as chordain
  
• bad chardain
  
• move daiin
  
• ...
  

except that the cards would be kept sorted alphabetically by the plain word.

but in my opinion, such a book cipher could explain the “synonyms”:

I don't think those (rare) repeated labels need an explanation.  Every language has words with two or more different meanings, like "trunk" of a tree, "trunk" to put stuff in, "trunk" of an electric grid, "trunk" of an elephant...

Especially if the spelling is phonetic ("two", "to", and "too" should be written the same way).

And the repeated labels may be non-specific words like "main", "first", "second", "major", etc.

BTW,

• Synonyms: two different words with the same meaning (like buy and purchase).  
  
• Homographs: two words with same spelling but different sounds, (like record/noun and record/verb)
  
• Homophones: two word with same sound but different spellings (like to, two, too)
  
• Homonyms: two words very different meanings with same sound and spelling (like bat/animal and bat/stick).
  

Or, if there were several such sets of cards (this could explain the differences in the languages. Let’s say that in Currier A, qokedy means “tea,” while in Currier B, it means “blood”), this could be precisely the result of that.

In this case the word frequencies would be completely different.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

But in this scenario, the book could only be used by its author.

To decode the text one would need a copy of the cards.  After the whole text is encrypted, the Author would have to send the cards (or a copy) to the intended recipient.

The intended recipient would face great difficulty in deciphering all the words, which, given the multitude of meanings, would take a great deal of time.

To decode the text, one would re-sort the cards in order of the code (Voynichese word), then look up each Voynichese word and write down the plain translation.  This would recover the original plaintext exactly, so homonyms etc. would cause no more problem than reading the original would.

But, again, I don't think that Voynichese is a codebook cipher, because it would be too slow to write and read.  Without machine help, such ciphers are suitable only for short messages where the need for security justifies all that work.

All the best, --stolfi