Re: VMs: Blanks: trying to summarize...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Maurizio,

At 11:27 05/03/2004 +0100, you wrote:
> 1) late medieval / early modern ciphers usually omitted the blanks 
> (mainly, if I understand correctly, to obfuscate word boundaries). 
> However, those cyphers were in the vast majority applied to short messages 
> rather than long texts like the Vms.

Yes.

> 2) It is unlike (or at least it would be anachronistic) that Vms. blanks 
> were 'fake' blanks re-inserted (randomly?) after cyphering the text.

Yes: and there seems to be too much (word-initial / word-final) structure 
for blanks to be random.

> 3) It is practically impossible, for the time, that blanks belongs to the 
> cypher algorithm.

Yes.

> These points together make the very PRESENCE of blanks in the Vms. 
> unexplicable or at least problematic, if the ms. is considered a cypher text.

Yes.

However... I think there is another possibility. If the plaintext were in 
fact a shorthand (based on abbreviation), removing all blanks might have 
proved problematic to reconstructing meaning.

> 4) In the Vms., at least looking at the portions of running texts, strings 
> delimited by blanks 'look like' words:
>
> there are patterns -- as shown, for instance, by the stem + ending 
> hypothesis --, there are frequent and rare words, there are preferred 
> initial and final letters, etc... Of course, the fact that (again, if I 
> understand correctly) statistical distributions do not match any 
> reasonably applicable language cannot be disregarded, but the former 
> elements cannot be disregarded either.

Yes. However, AIUI Voynichese words generally have a very low instance 
count, which is hard to reconcile with their being part of a language 
(whether real or artificial).

> Do all these elements substantiate the hypothesis that the Vms. is not a 
> cypher text at all?

I agree that there must have been a good reason for spaces to be retained, 
which would seem to run counter to normal cipher practice: hence, I suspect 
that this points to an unusual kind of plaintext, or to an unusual kind of 
cipher process (and possibly to both). But (as mentioned before) I think 
that cipher systems where space performs a coding function would have been 
far too conceptually esoteric for the kind of time frame this seems to be 
from: and so I suspect that it's instead probably based on an unusual kind 
of plaintext.

Incidentally, if you subscribe (as I do) to the theory that at least some 
of the VMs' system is based on a verbose cipher (at the very least qo, dy, 
or, ol), then half-spaces often make sense as a kind of disambiguation 
mechanism.

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


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