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….

The first thing to remember is that this system can use an almost infinite choices for the encipherer, when it comes to the choice between what comprises an “a” and a “b”. For your example, Tony chose “c” and “\” -like strokes… I tried several things, the most promising being the distinction between high and low characters. I felt that there was such a differentiation between the heights of characters that this would be a logical choice for ease of enciphering and deciphering. In fact I could pull the (speculative) a’s and b’s very easily.

I tried the highs as a’s and the lows as b’s, and then tried the opposite. I also used several different character breaks… strict breaks at first, and then using any string of characters as one… the usual problem with any attempts: i.e., what comprises a character. For instance, I would use a string of VMs “c’s” both as one low character, and then alternately (in separate attempts, of course) as individual low characters… two or three as would be the case.

Interestingly I found some compelling strings of Latin syllables, in one of the half dozen versions of factors I tried… and none in the others. Also, I found that one alternation of high/low choices had all the a/b strings fall within the alphabet, and the other has impossible strings. I found this interesting and encouraging enough to go back and try various blocks of text over time.

As you point out, a danger of these attempts is a great susceptibility to subjective error. I would recommend the Friedman’s book on this subject, “The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined”, as a great indication of what can go wrong when trying such an attempt on any text:
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=11853542
This book puts to rest any possibility that the Biliteral has anything to do with the writings of Shakespeare… and I won’t even add IMO in this case. The Friedman’s make an air tight argument.

But nonetheless, I feel it needs more time and effort, and I, too, have seen others mention it, and wonder at it. The idea itself fits well within my time frame and circle of influence… and I find it interesting that you did not dismiss it on those grounds, considering that you do not agree that time and influence possible… But I would not yet dismiss it on the other grounds you give: That is, on the result from the characters in the example you cite, or the fact that it would only yield a 1 to 5 plain text. First, because so many alternate character differences may have been chosen, and second, because we cannot assume any level of content to the Voynich. There is no reason to pre-suppose it contains any more than one fifth the characters which we see…

All that being said, the Biliteral is one of my three favorite candidates, and holds promise in my opinion, for many reasons even beyond what I’ve touched on in this (overly long) response…