Re: VMs: While reviewing emails

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff,

At 20:52 01/02/2004 +0000, Jeff wrote:
> Nick Pelling wrote
>
> My personal opinion is that the link between "q" and "o" in "qo" is far too
> structured to match Strong's idea of a polyalphabetic cipher. In his
> decrypts, "qo" seems to come out differently each time... which doesn't
> work for me. When I look at the VMs, I see a *structured ciphertext* - but
> passing plaintext through anybody else's polyalphabetic cipher would give
> an *unstructured ciphertext*.
>
> BINGO! "In his
> decrypts, "qo" seems to come out differently each time"
>
> That one phrase says all you ever need to know. If you have the right
> information at hand.

So... you're agreeing that Strong got it wrong, then?

AIUI, Strong had only two pages of Voynichese text to work from, so would 
have been unaware that verbose-cipher-like pairs like ("qo", "ol", "or", 
"dy", etc) appeared so overwhelmingly often through the rest of the text.

Alternatively... one mechanism I can imagine is that (as I've suggested for 
the gallows) "qo" might tell the decipherer to read a character 
sequentially from somewhere elsewhere on the same page (for example, from 
the start (or end) of the same line, or from inside a Neal key [ie between 
two nearby single-leg gallows]). Now *that* would make sense to me... :-)

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


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