Edith Sherwood’s anagram cipher…
A new day brings a new Google Adwords campaign from Edith Sherwood (Edith, please just email me instead, it’ll get the word out far quicker), though this time not promoting another angle on her Leonardo-made-the-Voynich-Manuscript hypothesis… but rather a transposition cipher Voynichese hypothesis. Specifically, she proposes that the Voynich Manuscript may well be Italian written in a simple (i.e. ‘monoalphabetic’) substitution cipher, but also anagrammed to make it difficult to read.
Anagram ciphers have a long (though usually fairly marginal) history: Roger Bacon is widely believed to have used one to hide the recipe for gunpowder (here’s a 2002 post I made on it), though it’s not quite as clear an example as is sometimes claimed. And if you scale that up by a factor of 100, you get the arbitrary horrors of William Romaine Newbold’s anagrammed Voynich ‘decipherment’ *shudder*.
More recently, Philip Neal has wondered whether there might be some kind of letter-sorting anagram cipher at play in the VMs: but acknowledges that this suggestion does suffer from various practical problems. I also pointed out in my book that Leonardo da Vinci and Antonio Averlino (‘Filarete’) both used syllable transposition ciphers, and that in 1467 Alberti mentioned other (now lost) kinds of transposition ciphers: a recent post here discussed the history of transposition ciphers in a little more detail.
So: let’s now look at what Edith Sherwood proposes (which is, at least, a type of cryptography consistent with the VMs’ mid-Quattrocento art history dating, unlike many of the more exotic ciphering systems that have been put forward in the past), and see how far we get…
Though her starting point was the EVA letter assignments (with a few Currier glyphs thrown in), she then finessed the letter-choices slightly to fit in with the pharma plant label examples she picked: and there you have it (apart from H, J, K, Q, X, Y, Z and possibly F, which are all missing). All you’d have to do, then, is to anagram the rest of the text for yourself, sell the book rights, and retire to a sea-breezy Caribbean island.
Might Edith Sherwood be onto something with all this? No, not a hope: for example, the letter instance distribution is just plain wrong for Italian, never mind the eight or so missing letters. As with Brumbaugh’s wobbly label-driven decipherment attempts, I somehow doubt you would ever find two plausible adjacent words in the main body of the text. Also: what would a sensible Italian anagram of “qoteedy” (“volteebg”) be?
Her plants are also a little wobbly: soy beans, for example, were only introduced into Europe in the eighteenth century… “galioss” is a bit of a loose fit for galiopsi (not “galiospi”, according to “The Botanical Garden of Padua” on my bookshelf), etc.
As an aside, I rather doubt that she has managed to crack the top line of f116v: “povere leter rimon mist(e) ispero”, “Plain letter reassemble mixed inspire” (in rather crinkly Italian).
All the same, it is a positive step forward, insofar as it indicates that people are now starting to think in terms of Quattrocento dating and the likely presence of non-substitution-cipher mechanisms, both of which are key first steps without which you’ll very probably get nowhere.
March 26th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I was fascinated by all the information Edith Sherwood got. At first, I did believed Leonardo Da Vinci wrote the VM, but couple days later I doubt that.
If you look at page 5 of the VM, the second circle lists four sets of 17 caracters each
The childish drawings, otherwise they could be nicer, more defined, it just couldn’t be Leo’s and the writing, well the writing looks too fine for a child
March 26th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Hi Vicky,
There’s a certain kind of romantic history that seeks to join the dots between famous people and infamous things. Over the years, people have contrived ways of linking poor old Leonardo with all kinds of stuff, even the fictional Priory of Sion (*sigh*). As far as I can see, Edith Sherwood has amassed not a jot of evidence that actually links Leonardo with the Voynich Manuscript: and so she ends up investing so much time into why the basic right-handedness of the writing can be reconciled with his basic left-handedness, rather than actually accepting what the evidence is saying and starting again.
Truth be told, I’m enough of a closet romantic that I’d love Edith’s theory to be right: but that doesn’t make it so. Oh well!
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:33 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Matthew Moskwa, Brett Holman. Brett Holman said: Has the Voynich Manuscript been decoded? http://bit.ly/7AueHZ No. http://bit.ly/4uyFEx [...]
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm
“Doctor” Sherwoods analysis is faulty to the point of embarrassment.
After viewing the claims on her webpage that the manuscript is written in “Italian Anagrams” I laughed, then about threw my laptop across the room because of how ridiculous her claim is, and here’s why:
1) Anagrams are the rearranging of letters from a parent or subject word, to form one or more smaller words in the same language. In each example of data she ‘decoded’ the anagrams she starts with are not words in Italian, so at best they could be considered “jumbles,” which leads me to …
2) If this is writing in a “jumble” form, there would be only as many unique tokens as there are distinct phonemes (or more likely, letters) in the medieval Italian alphabet. Conservative estimates put the alphabet in the manuscript closer to 30 than the ~20 supposedly used in the medieval equivalent.
3) The syntactic structure of the language hasn’t been addressed. If it is Italian in root then it should be head-initial. Something to investigate.
4) Back to the structure of anagrams: If they are anagrams, the words should also follow the same phonotactic and phonological rules of the parent language. Most notably, the “anagrams” violate rules regarding CCC (tri-consonantal clusters) and branching onsets.
She either needs to address the material from a scientific (not using “the DaVinci Code as inspiration,) method, or, and preferable to all serious linguists, stop all together.
BTW, if she’s going to call herself “Doctor” or add “PhD” after her name when discussing something that is clearly not a master at, I will as you all to address me as “Sir” or “Knight of the Realm.”
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:59 pm
I think its very unfair to criticise Dr Eith its obvious she has puta lot of effort into her work and has the decency to share it with othersalthough she has had answers and feedback ive put a valid breakthrouugh on different forums on the beale codes and had one replys, which is worse than being criticised, STAN.
September 29th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
While I thought the Da Vinci connection was unusual, being written by a child might be an angle to investigate – especially since children can make errors that might very, very easily fool a computer.
I, personally, always suspected the manuscript to be an Alchemical text.
September 29th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
James: while it’s entirely possible that the VMs’ scribe was a fairly young scribe (working for the encipherer), I really don’t think it was composed by someone young, not even a young Leonardo. And as for alchemy… well, just as with claims of heresy, there’s precious little in the drawings to support the idea, in fact possibly only the “green lion”-like root in the wide herbal bifolio at the back. Nobody could understand the obscure symbolism of alchemical texts even they were written in normal language, so why encipher them as well? :-p
April 25th, 2011 at 11:29 am
Hmm – but why not? Her theory looks not so bad. It realy may be just a XVIII century scam/spam or guy who written this may have travelled even to America’s or many countries.
I think probably no one will use very advanced cipher to book that kind.
Rather something very simple for him/her/friends. Just to make some sense if they known it.
But – could someone say – why nobody checked the paint used to write it with C14 method? – maybe it will lost some of mystery if it will be just usual XIX/XX scam…
I think if this a real coded or unusual language book the key is to in plant drawings.
Why not even Google -> make an algorithm to check the scanned drawings and pictures of plants in books/photos that they have in they large base?
April 25th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
wdsd: you need a good amount of material for radiocarbon dating, far more than you can get from scraping a bit of ink off a page. It would be nice if there was much we could learn from the VMs’ herbal drawings, but I think just about every medieval herbal researchers out there has had a look at the Voynich by now. We need a quite different kind of insight and/or data to move us on, not more of the same.
August 17th, 2011 at 2:22 am
I believe that the so called experts have failed. So, it is a positive that folks not within the circle of mainstream cryptographers are taking a fresh and “uneducated” (ie. unbiased) look at the VM. What if anything has been done with AI to try and read the VM?
August 17th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
GEEK: it’s certainly a suggestion that I hear a lot. But actually, the experts do know an awful lot about the limits of our VMs knowledge – that is, the limits of the statistical and inferential tools we use to understand the VMs. The honest truth is that computation (whether ‘AI’, cryptological heuristics, or sheer brute force) hasn’t so far helped us a great deal, and there isn’t a high likelihood that this will reverse any time soon: I suspect the next significant steps forward will come from non-computational types of knowledge… but we shall see, I guess.