VMs: Possible decrypt (follow-up)...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

> http://voynich.info/vgbt/strokes.jpg.

GC's posting about Roman numerals reminds me of the attempted decrypt I 
posted a few months back: solo x oz exodi

My suspicion was that - even if most of the text was encoded - there may 
well be individual labels that were not, and which might be breakable. It 
was known by about 1450 that shorter messages were harder to crack, so some 
labels may have been left unencoded (or just heavily abbreviated).

I then looked through the VMS for the best example of this, and settled on 
the orphan label on f65r. This label is alone on the page (no long gallows, 
no fancy stuff), is written using a small quill, and looks suspiciously 
like an afterthought:
        <f65r.L.1;V>       otaim.dam.alam=

Background: I suspect that EVA "dain" ==> "zoiv" ==> "6 oncia" (read from 
right-to-left) - and also that EVA "m" ==> "x". This gives me a base cipher 
mapping (unencoded) of

        n       -->     V
        i       -->     I
        a       -->     O
        m       -->     X
        d       -->     Z

As with other ciphers, Fontana's cipher often mixes "s" and "x", and 
contemporaneous cipher (and shorthand) alphabets often merge other pairs 
into a single shared symbol, like "u/v", "s/z", etc. Spelling also was a 
little more variable than we're used to. :-)

Putting all that together, the label on f65r would map to:-

        ot[OIX].[ZOX].[O]e[OX]

I then guessed at <l> --> L, and <ot> --> [D], reversed it all, and got:

        XOLO . X OZ . (E)XOD-

The "X OZ" I'm happy with (10 oncia), "XOLO" makes reasonable sense as 
"SOLO", and the last part is no more than a guess. A word beginning with 
"X" could be either "S..." or "EX..."

I also suspect that "o + gallows" (probably a letter) is quite different 
from "gallows + other stuff" (probably a number)... but nothing solid just yet.

OK, it's all a bit thin: but it might be a start. :-)

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

PS: many of Leonardo's ideas were actually other people's ideas that he 
appropriated and/or developed. Who's to say that the idea of left-right 
mirror-writing (for the left-handed) wasn't one of those same ideas? It may 
not have been adopted by anyone after Leonardo, but that doesn't imply that 
he must have invented it, right?

PPS: If you read VMS astro labels right-to-left, they then generally 
*terminate* in EVA <o> or <y>. The latter would be quite consistent with 
its being the Tironian nota (ie, for the normal *end* of a word).