Re: VMs: Further investigatio of folio f1r

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dennis,

At 12:37 05/04/2004 -0500, Dennis wrote:
>         A brief comment here about transposition ciphers.
> Transposition ciphers seem very unlikely to me due to
> the low second-order character entropy of VMs text and
> the highly structured nature of Voynichese words.

Certainly, "Rail Fence" transposition ciphers (as described in most history 
of cryptography works - and Wikipedia's account is no exception) seem 
unrelated to what we see in the VMs:-
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_cipher

However, this whole model would seem to rely on a very "serialistic" 
print-centric mindset (ie one character at a time, along a regular line), 
which one might date to after 1500. But remember that I recently described 
Neal keys as possibly being a quite different type of transposition cipher 
(extracting rare letters from a stream and placing them elsewhere on the 
page): and there are, again, yet other types of early modern transposition 
cipher which might be in evidence here.

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


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