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An alphabetic cipher

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• An alphabetic cipher

• An alphabetic cipher

  dfs346 > 14-02-2024, 03:00 PM

  Further thoughts on the possibility of an alphabetic cipher in the Voynich manuscript.
  
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• RE: An alphabetic cipher

  Hermes777 > 14-02-2024, 08:22 PM

  This seems like a worthwhile approach to me. 
  
  As I see it, the whole problem with the text is that at the higher levels we see characteristics consistent with a natural language, but at the lower levels everything seems mechanical and artificial (triple glyphs and so on.)
  
  One explanation would be that the natural characteristics are accidents of some mechanical process of generation. But it is more likely, in the first instance, that a natural language has been scrambled at the lower levels creating the appearance of mechanical generation. 
  
  The assumption of simplicity is appealing. The wallchart is great! 
  
  Simplicity is what inclines me to pursue underlying 'paradigms' or models as a similar approach but without the other assumptions. Rather than extending the number of slots in the model (to 12) I was led to a dual paradigm system. It could also come with simple instructions: "Mix these together."

• RE: An alphabetic cipher

  tavie > 14-02-2024, 08:27 PM

  I want this wall chart...

• RE: An alphabetic cipher

  pfeaster > 21-02-2024, 03:02 AM

  Simply rearranging the letters of each word into a fixed order seems like an awfully impractical encoding scheme.  Ersu, I eoppssu bdemoosy cdlou abcceilnovy cdeehipr chsu a ghint, btu eht ceoprss dlouw eb dehiillsvy cdffiiltu.  Enjoy keeping that up for 100+ pages, dear reader!
  
  But it's not hard to imagine ways in which such a reordering could have been made easily reversible.  Say, for instance, that we break the text into syllables and sort the letters into alphabetical order while placing * in front of an initial consonant.
  
  el*n e*mz o*z e*dl a*cm i*mn *di *nos *t a*r i*v a*t
  
  is easily reversible as
  
  *n-e-l *m-e-z *z-o *d-e-l *c-a-m *m-i-n *d-i *n-o-s *t *r-a *v-i *t-a
  
  but the letters in each "word" follow an extraordinarily rigid order, with only * ever varying in its placement.  This wouldn't be fun to have to read, but I could at least imagine doing it.  Of course Sukhotin consonant-and-vowel analysis would go nowhere in this scenario.

• RE: An alphabetic cipher

  pfeaster > 21-02-2024, 03:12 AM

  (Somehow posted the same thing twice in rapid succession.  Please ignore!)

• RE: An alphabetic cipher

  ReneZ > 21-02-2024, 04:00 AM

  I looked at a very similar thing (briefly) a long time ago. The reordering I tried involved sorting the characters alphabetically in each word, but also alternating the consonants and vowels.
  
  Example: "r e o r d e r i n g"  -->  "e e i o" and "d g n r r r" --> "d e g e n i r o r r"
  
  The main purpose was to reduce the character bigram entropy. This worked to some extent, but not nearly enough to achieve the low levels of Voynichese. Note that I did this long before Stolfi's word paradigms came out, and these strongly suggest that such a type of word game is not likely to be sufficient to 'explain'  Voynichese.
  
  Of course, I was also worried whether this operation was reversible, because it creates collisions, i.e. several plain text words could be mapped onto the same encoded word. I tried that out using an English text, and it turned out that such collisions are quite rare. Much more rare than I had thought.
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