On another note, he could also have assigned a single character to larger groups of As and Bs. You would then encode a plaintext to the mapping first in its entirety and then fractionate them by converting groups to characters.

Example:

TEST = BAABA AABAA BAAAB BAABA

Split this in groups of 8 (128 possibilities/distinct characters):

BAABAAAB AABAAABB AABA…

…and assign each group of 8 to a single character.

As you can see, this actually compresses the plaintext information instead of inflating it.

It’s all theoretically possible, but how do you confirm such a method?

No… no evidence of course. I agree that the usual opinion on this may be correct… that the clumpiness, the seeming complexity, the odd and ordinary counts and so on and so forth, are due to some intricate… maybe probably so, as you say… cipher or code.

And I know you are being a bit “tongue in cheek” when you say it wouldn’t be there “just to entertain us”. But I would say it could be “there to confuse us”… useless complexity would be a fantastic, brilliantly diabolical cover for a simple cipher, and really very easy to do (not to see, however).

Rich.

I think this all amounts to a modern projection onto an historical situation. Unless you have any evidence to the contrary, the clumpiness is very probably there for a reason (i.e. as a direct result of the encipherment system) – not just to entertain us.

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

It’s true there is such a spread of symbols and so on, when Voynichese is viewed as distinct symbols. But my point was, and why the Biliteral could apply, that it is only two characteristics of these symbols which are needed, or would be used. Ten different symbols could be a’s, ten could be b’s, and you now have twenty symbols. But it does not matter, only one characteristic of each… you really, still, only have two symbols, easily read. In my example, height: High and low. Now it does not matter what the character is or looks like, or the strokes it contains… you only need to know high or low. It could be something else. All characters may contain some distinctive characteristic, which differentiates them into a’s and b’s, which is simple and readily apparent to the codes’ users. The complexity of their structure could be moot, and also then, a red herring. While we are looking at all the distinctions of gallows, for instance, it would not, in this case, matter one whit: They would all simply be: highs.

I think that such a system… like this, or some form of it… would in fact account for many of the problems of Voynichese… the seeming complexity, which the Biliteral would not need; the seeming bizarre word and character counts, which the Biliteral would not affect, or use… and so on. The Biliteral is a sort of “overlay” of what can look like a plain text language (Bacon suggested, as you know, two distinct typefaces), or look like a complex cipher, or even an illustration… so that what is seen seems like one thing (and can seem very complex), but then the true code is obvious to those who know it, is actually very, very simple to put in and pull out. I could, in fact, quickly write out a fake Voynichese line using Biliteral, which would be easily read by you in minutes. When I make my page I will give an illustrated example.

And you know, in my opinion, the code/cipher used is probably something extremely simple, just so far, unseen by us. There are several systems which would allow for this… biliteral is one.

Thanks for the detailed comment, much appreciated!.

From my own cryptological perspective, one of the things I’d expect to see emerging from any genuine historical use of a biliteral cipher is a fairly even spread of a’s and b’s. Yet every decomposition I’ve seen of Voynichese yields a very uneven (“clumpy”) and heavily-structured spread of symbols / tokens / strokes / bits / etc. Basically… at whatever level you look, you find a great deal of internal structure.

And so the question to consider is whether that structure arises as a result of the particular biliteral cipher alphabet that was chosen. Well… while a modern code-maker could construct a cipher to match just about any set of constraints, I’m not so convinced that anyone prior to the 20th century would have been able to do. While it’s true that people knew that adding additional enciphering stages makes ciphers much harder to crack (John Wilkins explicitly says as much at the end of his chapter IX, as I recall), I’m far from convinced that someone prior to the (say) 20th century would have been had a sufficiently masterly grasp of statistics to consciously design a biliteral alphabet that is simultaneously biliteral and clumpy.

One might call this a “Rugg-ish historical fallacy”: that just because someone with a PC could design such a thing today, then someone could (theoretically, at least) have designed the same thing 400+ years ago. Yes, it’s a possibility… but that doesn’t begin to explain how they managed to get to that end point (if they were even aware of what that end point might look like).

Which is not to say that (say) Francis Bacon wouldn’t have been clever enough to follow just about any intellectual procedure through to its logical conclusion: but, rather, that I strongly doubt that he or anyone else had a sufficiently abstracted view of statistics to construct something specifically to simulate the statistical model of something else.

Bacon’s biliteral cipher was just a way of hiding a message surreptitiously – it was a steganographic notion, not a overtly cryptographic one. When I look at “aiiv” glyph-blocks, I see something else masquerading as a medieval page reference: so there’s definitely steganography there. And when I look at the low entropy / highly-structured glyph pairs, I also see verbose cipher tricks at play. Hence I’d agree that the biliteral cipher, with its steganography and verbosity, does press the right cryptographic buttons… unfortunately not quite in the right way.

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….