Can I Get The Short Version Of The More Credible Theories Of The Voynich Manuscript?

can I get the short version of the more credible theories of the Voynich Manuscript?

The most likely explanation, to me and quite a few others who know far more about it than I, is that it’s in a language that died out. Imagine the guy who made the Cherokee syllabary, and then a few books were written in it, and then… a war happened, or a famine. The Cherokee had to flee somewhere and died out, or inter-married into another group and lost their individual cultural identity. Then someone finds one of those books. Some think it’s a cipher, but cryptanalysis will always fail to find the answer. Some think it’s in a language like Spanish, or English, they will always fail too. Eventually someone may try some Native American language that has commonalities with Cherokee and they may get somewhere.

So, the most likely scenario is that someone created a writing system for a European language, in the 16th century, for a small ethnic group that became the victims of war, plague, famine, or had to flee and become refugees or simply died out. Perhaps that language remains somewhere, and no one has tried to apply it to the Voynich yet. Perhaps it’s died out completely, or changed so much and we don’t know what the Old version of that language was like 500 years ago, but if it was, say a Germanic language, or related in some way to a surviving language, we may figure out some of the manuscript due to similarities.

I’ll just give you the short version of why Bax and Rugg are very likely wrong in their theories. Bax believes he knows what the name of some of the plants in the herbal section are, and so he says, ‘If you assign these letters or syllables to these symbols, it spells out the name of these plants in,“ and I forget what language he thinks it’s in. But anyway, the problem is that when he applies those values to those same symbols elsewhere, he gets no new information. If it were just a simple substitution, or a plain language, then applying values to a dozen or more symbols, as he has, in a book so large, should surely result in at least one readable word somewhere else. The only way it couldn’t is if it’s in a cipher that is more advanced than simple substitution, in which case, why are the names in the herbal section not also in that cipher?

Rugg proposes a theory to explain how the Voynich is a fake, a generated text meant to create a book to scam Rudolph II out of 600 ducats. It was meant to look impressive, but the person obviously just wants the money so they don’t want to write a real book. They’re thieves, they don’t want to work for a living, they want something cooked up quick to get some money, then disappear with it. The problem is that the Voynich is not a randomly generated text. We have tests for that. There are language like relationships in how the words fit together. Some letters are very likely to be used at the start of words, and rarer in the middle or end. Some letters, like our Q and U, appear together often. There are some problems, like a shortage of repitition in phrases, but it’s clearly not someone just sitting and picking letters at random.

So, Rugg has to come up with a way that it could be faked, but still generate all of these relationships. And he does that, if you take a grill with squares cut out, and from a table of possible letters or short combos, you roll some dice and look them up on the table, then write that combo in the book, you’ll get a randomly generated text, that has some relationships, especially if there are several tables so you get those first and last letter frequencies that are above the mean average.

The problem though, is why would the lazy thieves come up with this troublesome and complicated system, to thwart a cryptanalytical technique that wasn’t discovered until 200 years after they would have died? It’s like if I made a claim about a cipher today, and hundreds of years from now some cryptographer living on Venus, with her personal quantum computer, found statistical evidence that the cipher was what I said it was. And a future Rugg came along and proposed some elaborate scheme by which I would have spent months rolling dice and looking at charts, to craft a fake PGP email, in order to pass an analytical test that I couldn’t possibly have predicted would exist someday.

I mean, Rugg proposes that it took four months to make the Voynich with his system, but I’m sure it probably would have taken that long if it was just copied straight from another book, little less having to roll dice and look up the results on a chart upward of…. I can’t find how many characters there are, but there were 272 pages in the book, and some of the pages without illustrations are quite packed with characters. So at a guess we’d be talking about 10′s of thousands of dice rolls. Seriously, the repetitive stress injuries alone would probably preclude it from consideration by any thieves attempting it. Especially since they could just scribble any old thing they wanted and pass it off to Rudolph II, because like I said, at that time no one could analyze a text to determine if the frequencies indicated it was just random. So long as they kept to a limited amount of characters and repeated them fairly often, no one at the time could have possible detected it was a fake.

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cryptography history sorry i post a lot about the voynich manuscript but it's seriously fascinating