Where Do We Go From Here?

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	First of all, welcome to the newcomers!  By profession
I'm a chemical engineer.  I've been involved in this
list since 1996.  You can find my (and everyone else's)
Voynich site at:

http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/

(Unfortunately, my site isn't working at the moment,
due to problems with my host provider.)

	My theory in the past was that the VMs is in medieval
French, with the "word" spaces in the text being
syllable breaks.  This would explain the short length
of Voynichese words.  The low character entropies of
the text would be explained by the use of a verbose
cipher, that is, one that substitutes several
characters for each phoneme.  

	However, Gabriel Landini recently noted that 1600
words make up 80% of the corpus, against the 280 I had
believed.  So much for my old theory.

	Gabriel also noted in a letter to New Scientist
magazine,

> Interestingly, the word frequency distribution in the manuscript
> approaches Zipf's law, a statistical observation regarding the word frequency
> that is found in most languages. This property is unlikely to be preserved
> in texts encoded using polyalphabetical substitutions with many alphabets,
> since each plain text word has alternative spellings in the substituted
> coded form. Such alternative spellings depend on the number of alphabets
> used to encode the text and the word position in the manuscript with
> respect to the key.

	The idea of using several ciphers known at the time of
the VMs' composition together is an attractive one, but
if I'm not mistaken, Gabriel's remark also rules that
out.  We also have Jim Reeds' observation that if the
VMs were in any known cipher, it would have been solved
long ago, given the giants of cryptology such as
William Friedman and Brid. Gen. John Tiltman, who have
worked on the VMs.

	So far as I can see, the VMs must be written in an
artificial language, like the philosophical ones of
Dalgarno and Wilkins.  To solve such a document, we
must find out how the author categorized the world of
knowledge, partly by studying old, well-attested
examples of such systems, partly by looking at the
structure of the VMs.   It looks like quite a task to
me.

Cheers, 
Dennis Stallings