Re: W-Hypothesis

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bernd (and everyone else),

I think it's very telling that Vigenere included *so many* alphabets (100 
or so?), yet *not one* of them shows any kind of similarity in either 
approach or mindset to the VMS' alphabet.

Just about the largest visual overlap that occurs between any of them and 
the VMS is one character (and that's normally "8").

The only structural overlap I could see was in the Alphabeth Northmanique...

	http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wulfric/rentexte/vigenere/chif_f338r1.jpg

.....which only has 10 separate symbols, and uses impossible (or very 
unlikely) pairs of them to represent the other letters. Its ciphertext 
would have a low-entropy text-stream - but otherwise has no similarities to 
the VMS. But this is just a trick that had probably been known for 
centuries. :-/

All the same, it seems obvious to me that in 15th Century Italy (and even 
within the individual city-states there), many (most?) individual 
professions (with or without Guilds) would have used their own substitution 
alphabets for their communications. Vigenere worked in the Vatican, & 
wasn't a social anthropologist: so it shouldn't really be surprising that 
his list of alphabets was derived from the (largely international and 
classical?) documents available to him there, not from "the street".

The shorthand astrological alphabet that I believe the VMS to have been 
constructed on top of would probably have been one such private 
substitution alphabet, possibly used by a Guild (or group, or school) of 
astrologers, alchemists, or herbalists, possibly in a single Italian town. 
To my eyes, it's a mature, comfortable, practical, socially-oriented 
script, that the writers were able to write at a reasonable speed, and to 
visually validate as they went (even encoded!)

Who's to say a short document (say, a chit, or an order, or a list) using a 
similar astrological shorthand alphabet won't be discovered tomorrow in 
(say) a trunk in Padua's Town Hall? At least, now, we'd know what to look 
for. :-)

Whatever Vigenere says, "90%+ of the VMS is padding" theories don't work 
for me: I'm certain all the answers are right in front of us on the page, 
if only we look to see them. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: has any Voynicher ploughed through Paul Oskar Kristeller's "Iter 
Italicum : a finding list of uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued 
humanist manuscripts"?