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Re: Cipher vs Language

Hi everyone,

It would be helpful if these many arguments that
the VMs is not language could be presented.
The only one I am aware of is that the language
in question (if it is one) has not been identified.
But there are many that are in favour of the MS
being plain language, written in some ideosyncratic
script.

The winning argument for me is that the VMS' language shows every sign of fitting the mature ciphertext paradigm dating from the time we're talking about:-
(1) no obviously doubled letters ("cc" aside)
(2) no obvious punctuation
(3) an invented alphabet
(4) trying to hide the basic word structure
(5) trying to hide the underlying alphabet
(6) no obvious numbering system
(7) nulls

I can't stress how important the lack of a numbering system is: I'm sure that any list of recipes - whether Chinese, Malay, or Romagnan - would include numbers somewhere... but we simply can't find them.

So: if you think it's an actual language, why did they bother to hide the numbers? That makes no sense to me.

In addition, the VMS alphabet has a symbol that I believe was appropriated from another cipher alphabets (ligatured EVA "qo" from Tristan Sforza's cipher, taken from the Tranchedino cipher register).

So: if you think it's an actual language, why reuse a symbol from a cipher alphabet? And for Asian languages, why reuse Western abbreviations and signs?

Also: the statistical distribution of "word"-lengths doesn't make sense to me in the context of a natural language - this seems many times more likely to be an artificial property emerging from a stage within a cipher transformation.

Why no doubled letters, yet a very small number of (active) symbols?

Why no punctuation? This is a quick and easy way to give text shape - whether brackets, or full stops, or commas, or whatever.

Nulls, too: there is only one page that looks (to me) like it doesn't have nulls at line ends - the "poem" page on f81r. Just about everywhere else, text goes right up to the line-ends, often deteriorating in the last few characters, in much the way that I'd expect nulls to (Currier noted as much). If it's a language, why bother with nulls at line-ends?

To my eyes, the code underlying the Voynich was designed from the same basic set of design principles that just about all ciphers of the time used - but with some subtle twists that we're too self-absorbed (in our comfortable modern mindsets) to notice.

I know I should really be more accommodating: but in my defence, I've looked at tons of ciphers from this period, and all I see are similarities with the VMS. Sorry. :-(

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