Re: Cryptography of 1502 with Voynich resonances

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

There is an old 'IBM syllable code' that predates me, but is
still in use.  It is used (the only example I know) for
Mandarin, which is probably very different in nature to whatever
the language Voynich is in.  However, since there is a fine line
in Mandarin between 'words' and 'syllables', a text written in
this code might be interesting to analyze, a sentence on a
syllable by syllable basis in Mandarin may mathematically
correspond (somewhat) to a similar level analyses of a western
language.  I don't know where to find documents encoded this
way, but they are probably still in existence.  There may even
be software out there for converting to IBM syllable code, as
this method is still used for inputting Chinese on popular
software.  Unfortunately there are less than 230 syllables in
Mandarin, as opposed to more 'sound rich' Western languages. 
Each syllable is given a digraph to make it computer friendly. 
I'll look for texts in this format or conversion programs.  It's
not a perfect language for comparison (probably) but it would
allow us to evaluate some of the characteristics of that sort of
code (especially LSC).  If this is the same sort of code, the
work used to find similar instances (especially ones of usable
length) and make them computer readable would be immense.  Using
IBM syllable code documents already in existence, or created to
use as a suitable comparison would save huge amounts of time. 
There might be other examples of IBM syllable code in use for
western languages with alphabets that fall into non-standard
ASCII, though I doubt it.  However I have seen the same sort of
need result in an identical approach for place names.
Regards,
Brian

Adam McLean wrote:
> 
> > Does this mean that the encryption by pairs of letters
> > is what constitutes the nomenclator? If so, then I have
> > always misunderstood its meaning (thinking that it meant
> > the use of short code groups for entire words - important
> > ones at that).
> 
> Sorry I should have posted on the 'nomenclateur' that Speziali
> shows in his article. This is a list of trigrams found in the coded
> message with their meanings. I  have scanned it as a jpg and
> attach it to this message.
> 
> It appear that this was a list or dictionary necessary for the
> decipherment of the message. Perhaps codes like these were
> developed in which special identified words in the text were
> treated differently. Some words decoded using some sort of
> substitution common in the period but others needed to be looked
> up in a dictionary. Here it was trigrams. Perhaps it is some similar
> kind of mixed-method code that lies behind the Voynich, and that
> is why it seems impervious to the decoding methods tried so far.
> Without access  to the dictionary it will probably be almost
> impossible to decode it.  However, it may be that codes like the
> one found by Speziali are quite common and that their dictionary
> structures had sufficient similarities for someone to try to
> reconstruct the Voynich look-up table. It would need someone
> to try and find examples of such dimplomatic codes of the early
> 16th century. Surely someone, somewhere has done a Ph.D. on
> this.
> 
> Adam McLean
> 
> 
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