(10-09-2017, 04:14 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If each character can represent 23 words you get billions upon billions of possible translations. A one way cipher of Stellar proportions.
I think cipherman meant that each letter in the Voynich alphabet represents one and only one word, and there are ~23 letters in the Voynich alphabet, so there are only ~23 words in its vocabulary. That's the way that I read the Gibbs quote too.
Either interpretation would be strange though. If every letter in the alphabet maps to only one word, then the vocabulary would be about 30 at most, with a few extras from the "weirdo" characters. This would easily beat
Green Eggs and Ham in its text-size-to-vocabulary ratio.
Applying what little we see of the proposed solution to the entire text certainly reads like
Green Eggs and Ham too...
If, on the other hand, Gibbs meant that every letter in the
text can map to multiple words, then we get too many possibilities and unacceptable information loss during encryption, as you mention.
It's really strange how this has been touted as the definitive solution and we can all pack up and go home. In the past, even the biggest proposals in the media got headlines like "has the Voynich Manuscript finally been solved?" or "This professor may have decoded the mysterious Voynich Manuscript". They were all good progress or a strong proposal, not "the one". This time, for instance, Ars Technica's headline uses no questions or "maybe", it just says that it has finally been solved after a century and that's that. I've never seen this level of confidence in a publicised solution, especially one that has not been published!