If you combine the thoughts I posted yesterday (suggesting that the “o[r]aiiv” word in the top line of f67r1 might encipher “luna”) with the “or oro ror” sequence on line #2 of f15v (which would appear to be a verbosely enciphered Roman numeral, probably “CCCC”), the two would superficially seem to be incompatible. How can the Voynichese “or“-pair encipher both “L” and “C” simultaneously?
Discarding wilfully ambiguous cipher systems (such as Brumbaugh’s “convert everything to a digit and then back to a letter), the answer would be a stateful cipher system, by which I mean a cipher system which reuses the same output letters according to which one of a set of internal states it occupies. Voynich theorists typically predict that the gallows would be the main state-switching mechanism (though Steve Ekwall also asserts that “c” / “cc” / “ch” change the internal state as well – this is what all his “folding and flipping” claims specifically relate to).
Arguably the first known stateful cipher was proposed in Alberti’s De Cifris in 1467: this was a cipher disk pair where the rotor disk rotated relative to the stator disk according to an arrangement between encipherer and decipherer (typically every few words).
Now, to modern cryptographic eyes, the whole point of per-character stateful ciphers (such as Vigenère etc) is to destroy both the numerical statistics as well as the linguistic structure of the ciphertext, as they provide two layers of information that can be used to help break that text. However, this does not seem to have been the case with Alberti’s cipher, while it certainly does not seem to be the case with Voynichese, where there is apparently both visual and statistical evidence of word structure.
Yet Voynichese uses only an alphabet-sized set of characters in its cipherbet, so does not seem to be relying on a secondary codebook at all (even Alberti’s cipher disk used a secondary codebook), so one of the few ways in which it can obfuscate its output over so many pages of ciphertext is via some form of primary statefulness.
However, there seems to be no direct evidence that Voynichese uses only statefulness: rather, it gives the impression of retaining some kind of high-level linguistic structure from the plaintext, but perhaps with letter patterns disrupted within that.
To me, the likelihood is that Voynichese evolved out of what was initially a purely stateless verbose cipher, one where (for instance) “or”, “ol”, “ar” and “al” enciphered the repeated letters in Roman numerals: M C X I. The encipherer probably then hacked his/her own system (with tricks such as the space-insertion cipher we apparently see on f15v) to hide too-obvious repetitions. However, I suspect that an Arabic digit steganography hack was later grafted into the system (the a[i][i][i]v family), probably removing the need for the “I”: and that when the time came round to creating the VMs, some kind of additional stateful disruption might well have been added to this system, whereby the or/ol/ar/al pairs swapped around depending on the state… well, that’s as far as I’ve got, anyway.
Historically, the problem is that there is no evidence of any stateful cipher system prior to Rome in 1465 (when Alberti began researching his book), which doesn’t obviously seem to square with the radiocarbon dating. All the same, it’s not the first time that different forms of dating have yielded slightly different values for the same artefact, all grist for our historical mills… 🙂
Hi Nick
I think it pays to differentiate between stateful and configurable.
There must be any number of shades of grey between a system that is fundamentally and purposefully stateful in nature (changing state with each operation, symbol, or word), and systems which are stateless and static.
To create the former you need the sophistication and abstraction in thought to implement a mechanism of disconnection and reconnection, along with a motivation based on a specialist knowledge of the weaknesses of stateless systems, which is proposing a lot admitedly. But also the statistics exhibited by the VMs are not those of a truly stateless system as we know.
But a ‘configurable’ system can start life simply by employing multiple existing static ciphers within the same work…which may use overlapping symbolsets by pure coincidence or lack of creativity as much as it could have been intentional confusion.
And something else to keep within the mental possibility space is a system which is inherently but unintentionally stateful by operation.
But one thing is for sure, the VMs is either configurable or stateful, or both…
Marke
Marke: though I fully appreciate the wide spectrum of cryptographic statefulitudinosity, I would point out that I know of not one jot of evidence for any cipher prior to Alberti’s 1467 De Cifris that has any. Moreover, if I had given the post the more accurate title “Is Voynichese stateless or at-least-partially-stateful?” I would rather expect my house to get raided by the pedantry police within the day, and that would be particularly unpleasant. =:-o
Well the VMs is *evidently* not the same static system employed on each page. The difference between stateful and configurable is not a matter of pedantry and if someone is worried about violations of historical precedent then it is highly relevant I would have thought.
Of course the duck billed platypus was the most entertaining hoax of all time. Defying all those established taxonomic rules of reptiles, birds and mammals, those experts knew it had to be a hoax.
Just no one told the platypus it was a hoax. 😉
And Voynich called his manuscript his “ugly duckling”.
Hmmm….
Marke: relax, it was my own inexactitude and lack of pedantry that I was bemoaning, not any tendency to pedantry your comment may or may not have had. 🙂 As an aside, I’m also quite unaware of any obviously configurable early historical ciphers, which is perhaps an even bigger issue. Basically, what was arguably the earliest configurable cipher?
Without even having to say that the Voynich MS represents a cipher, it’s writing is clearly the result of some process, and the result either has a meaning or does not.
This process is what we’re trying to find. In all three cases: meaningfull, unintentionally meaningless, intentionally meaningless, the process could be stateful or stateless. It is not necessary that the author had any idea about these concepts, I think…
Cheers, Rene
Rene: surely you missed out “unintentionally meaningful”? You can’t deny that category exists, it seems to fill about 90% of the web these days. =:-o … Also, I’m not sure that you can force a pure dichotomy onto it: for one, cipher nulls would break that symmetry; and if the VMs was written with a nomenclator, a scribal shorthand or a code, it would only strictly mean something with reference to that (perhaps lost and/or perhaps not reconstructible) source. We could well end up with a document we can only ever read half of.
I intentionally left out unintentionally meaningful 🙂
The Voyinch MS as the oldest ever blog? Quite shocking that after 98 years it is still possible to come up with a completely new Voynich theory 😀
I agree that there is a continuum of possibilities between meaningful and unintentionally meaningless….
how about considering the o PP (first P reversed) as an honorific, equivalent to one of those in the Japanese hierarchy of honorific phonemes?
That would get rid of some of the repetitions, wouldn’t it?
I guess an approximate English equivalent would be the use of the thrice- repeated ‘holy’ or the scheme of holy, -ier – iest and then ‘most holy.’
Just a thought.