Not too much to ask for, is it?

Comparing how different operators used homophonic systems was the key to breaking them in the past, of course. I’m not aware of the exact details.

René and others have done more detailed cluster analyses of the VMs which break it down further than just A and B, of course. René did about the most extensive, AIRC.

True, true – but I think that it is reasonably safe to say that the well-known stats I mentioned (illustrating many of the main differences between Currier A and Currier B) do indicate some kind of change in the underlying system, and that a reasonable hypothesis is that C-A “cho” was largely (but not entirely) replaced by C-B “l”. That, at least, is testable: and may go some way to explaining what is going on.

If you talk with Glen Claston for any period of time, he’ll infect you with the idea that Voynichese did evolve in many more subtle ways than just the C-A/C-B barrier – and I think he’s probably right. Even so, perhaps it’s time that the C-A/C-B change was revisited in a more substantive way…

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

Whether that assumption is that there is a different underlying plaintext language, or a different content type, or a different system at work.

The analysis of ‘A’ and ‘B’ is just a step, and having entertained the idea that not all the pages may be using the same system it would also be a bit remiss to stop at the set of pages flagged as Currier-A or Currier-B.

The question then needs to be asked, “are the pages within these sections statistically consistent with each other, or are there also differences within A and within B just as significant as those between A and B?”.

Assuming uniformity of the whole VMs is undoubtedly a BIG mistake, but I believe the categorization into ‘A’ and ‘B’ may be an oversimplistic model and misrepresentation of the variation that exists across all pages which if we are not careful will mislead us into wrong thought about the process which creates the pages, and how it changes from one page to another.

There is nothing like statistics (and especially averages) to take a reality rich in detail and variation and in collapsing a multi-dimensional space to a single number produces something essentially meaningless.

(like the average human being having 1 breast and one testical and what is the colour of the average fruit?

In many cases looking at the proportion of symbols on Voynichese pages doesn’t produce a neatly polarized picture of two systems or varients at work, but something more subtle and complex with far more dimensions and degrees of freedom.

If we want to entertain there being “two systems” it is more like each page has a blend of influences from those two systems. But even that may be a proposal that is rigid and inflexible compared to the real Voynichese.

Perhaps there are eight systems and each page is a blend of those?

Suppose there were 8 system varients which differed and overlapped in subtle ways and the rules for blending them on a given page were subtle enough – it would be very hard to see where the “joins” were, and even more hard to separate and determine the details of each individual system, and work out which one was at work at what point – as you would need to do in order to decode the thing.

Marke

I merely think that the Q13a and Herbal-B pages were added in a different composition phase.

So do you think there’s actual content about herbs and baths in Herbal A and Q13B respectively, or are they the visual equivalent of null characters in a ciphertext, intended to distract from the meaningful content of the other sections?