Re: VMs: Further investigatio of folio f1r

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello, Jan,

> right you are. My only excuse is that while "letter" frequency of the VM
> followed Latin (but the text was still hidden even after the conversion) the
> transposition cipher was the only one which, additional used, would keep  the
> frequency intact.

	Have a look at my paper
http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/mbpaper.htm

	Under "Verbose Ciphers", I discuss a verbose cipher I
devised called "Cat Latin".  Cat Latin takes a Latin
plaintext and produces a ciphertext with about the same
single-letter frequencies as Latin but with digraph
frequencies that are very different.  The first- and
second-order entropies of Cat Latin match those of
Voynichese closely!  However, Cat Latin looks nothing
like Voynichese and has far longer word lengths.  

> It is also true that transposition  ciphers were not too popular in middle
> ages, when the art of substitution  cipher was  blossoming,  they already
> developed the grill. I guess our problem is complicated by the fact we take our
> rules indiscriminately: Zipf's laws and second entropy rules are based on certain
> assumptions only  - which, I have to admit, are not quite clear to me.

	I think you will agree that the combinations EVA
<[i][i][i]n>, <[i][i][i]r>, <ch>, <sh>, <ee>, <qo>,
<dy>, <ol>, <or>, <os> and <al> are very common in the
VMs. If these are present in the source text, a
transposition cipher that *operates on the single
characters* would break them up.   I find it hard to
imagine a transposition cipher that would *produce*
them in the ciphertext.  

	Of course, if these combinations are in the plaintxt
and the transposition cipher *rearranges them as
units*, it would be conceivable.  

	Finally, transposition ciphers typically do not leave
word divisions intact.  
Dennis
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