Researching cipher mysteries is almost always ponderous and frustrating: it will doubtless take all of 2021 for the work I put in to the WW2 pigeon cipher and the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letters during 2020 to bear fruit.
Yet what Dave Oranchak’s recent epic crack of the Z340 tells us is that if we can identify any unsolved cipher’s single most telling feature and then doggedly pursue that to its logical extreme, we stand a chance of toppling that particular Colossus (in the Classical sense of the word).
For the Z340, that telling feature was that taking every 19th character from the cipher yielded statistically anomalous results. And we now know that this was because a central part of the Z340’s cipher system was a “knight’s move” transposition step (i.e. two steps along and one step down).
So my two main challenges this year are (a) to stay laser-focused on the telling features presented by different cipher mysteries, and (b) to find new ways to pursue these telling features all the way to their logical conclusion.
Specifically…
1. Voynich Manuscript
In my mind, there’s something really wrong with Voynichese. Specifically, even though the differences between Currier A Voynichese and Currier B Voynichese run really deep, nobody seems to be talking about this.
Let’s compare a couple of lines from f1v (Herbal A)…
potoy.shol.dair.cphoal-dar.chey.tody.otoaiin.shoshy- choky.chol.cthol.shol.okal-dolchey.chodo.lol.chy.cthy-
…with a couple of lines from f26v (Herbal B):
pchedy.dar.cheoet.chy.sair.chees.odaiiin.chkeeey.ykey.sheey- teeedy.okeeos.cheeos.ysaiin.okcheey.keody.s!aiin.cheeos.qokes.or-
Voynich linguists typically try to downplay the differences between the two, but… really? What similarities there are tend to be either at the (low) level of (verbose cipher-like) groups (e.g. aiin, ar, al, etc) or purely positional (line-initial “p-“, word-final “-y”, line-final “-m”, etc). Even really common features like qo- are used very differently in A and B.
So, even though A & B seem to share a common framework, beneath that framework there seems to be more dividing them than joining them. And I think I’ve been guilty in not separating out A and B from the framework they share more clearly: we’ve probably all been guilty of that to some degree.
My first challenge for 2021 is therefore to look at Currier A and Currier B with fresh eyes. What do the two share, and how do they differ? Though I can’t yet properly express this, it feels as though we’ve been building our theories about Voynichese on sand, and the answers may be much simpler than we’re allowing ourselves to see.
2. Voynich Manuscript (Again)
One thing that popped up during 2020 was Antonio Averlino’s herbal. If you recall, having published The Curse of the Voynich in 2006, I was surprised to find out two years later that Antonio Averlino had his own herbal.
Thorndike’s “Science & Thought” quoted Giovanni Michele Alberto in MS Ashburnham 198, fol.78r: “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter.” So it would seem that Filarete had written on plants “elegantly in the vernacular tongue”.
It’s been a while since I last picked up the Filarete trail (which I’d worked pretty much to death back in 2006), so what I’d like to do this year is to go a-hunting for Filarete’s vernacular (i.e. Tuscan Italian) book on plants. This would involve drawing up a list of Tuscan herbal mss dating to around 1450-1460 (which surely can’t contain more than 40 or 50 possibilities), then reducing it down, and finally closely examining that which remaineth.
It’s a plan, at least. 🙂
However, because MS Ashburnham 198 isn’t visible online at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (please correct me if I’m wrong!), I still haven’t seen Alberto’s quotation in its full context. This annoys me because I don’t know whether Alberto was referring to an illustrated herbal or a purely textual herbal. As a consequence I don’t yet even know what kind of book to go looking for here. But hopefully I will soon…
(Note that Thorndike’s Chapter XII was “Revised and enlarged” [p.195] from the version that appeared in The Romanic Review, Vol. XVII, No.3, July-September 1926, so the latter is unlikely to have any extra information.)
3. Dorabella Cipher
I’ve recently been corrected by Cipher Mysteries commenter John Rehling, who took me to task for numerically over-egging Keith Massey’s theory about the Dorabella Cipher. Thanks to the magic of the binomial expansion, the chances of 13 cipher shapes out of 87 being immediately followed by their flipped version is in fact a mere 1 in 20815. (!)
On balance, I’m now wondering whether this is no more than a sign that the set of mirrored pairs at the end of the second line is just filler / padding, i.e. that Massey’s conclusion is still correct, but only in a very local and limited way.
However, if that is true, then the long stretches of the Dorabella Cipher that contain neither vertical E-shapes nor downward slanting E-shapes then become markedly more problematic. So I continue to think that there’s something deeply artificial about this cryptogram that messes up all our statistical analyses.
So I therefore need to have something of a Dorabella rethink in 2021. :-/
I just wish that the person who secretly owns the Dorabella Cipher (and who I can’t help but suspect sold a small piece of their Elgariana at Sotheby’s in 2016) would come forward, perhaps via a trusted third party. I believe that shining a simple UV light (even a bicycle marking light) on it might reveal Elgar’s real solution – and how good would that be?
This sounds like a fantastic plan for the Voynich! I look forward to following along and helping out wherever l can. FWIW, l poked around concerning your herbal clues and came to the conclusions you did – the di Constitutione Mundi manuscript is not scanned in, doesn’t seem to be available elsewhere (although it could well be part of the scholarly production of Giovanni Giraldi, who published extensively on GMA de Carrara (ex. Giraldi, Giovanni, ed. and trans. (1967). Opere Scelte. Novara: Istituto Geografico de Agostini, see Italian wiki for his full publishing list) – but all l could find online for Opere Scelte was a review which did not mention di Constitutione Mundi. If l do find anything useful, I’ll let you know.
Also, wanted to be sure you heard about a recent publication linked at Voynich Ninja – that appears to be, between figuring out the pattern of “delay” between the uses of the various glyphs (another example of nonlanguage behavior) and the weighted ligature analysis, essentially a complex contact mapping set up that delves into stenographic aspects. I found it very interesting.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348012391_Voynich_Manuscript_Numeric_Enigma
Will be quite interested in hearing your thoughts.
Always had problems with the Currier; not so much for his A & B gobbledegoop strangely although I’ve always stayed well cleat of what I din’t understand. Wasn’t he the man who first perceived the two different hands involved and when folks were comfortable with that, he added another and didn’t stop til he reached seven from memory. Might it not have been done in order to cover up one or two of his possible theoretical overeaches.
Nick: I think it is really good to run things to ground where possible, so it makes perfect sense to track down the reference to the Averlino herbal. If the reference that you have is correct then it should be pretty straightforward. Whether the author had any more to say on the Averlino herbal or if what they have said is still ambiguous remains to be seen. It is frustrating if the evidence one has does not enable one to answer a question definitively one way or the other.
Nick: Is your idea that the Averlino herbal you refer to is not the Voynich manuscript, but that there is a different Averlino herbal that corresponds to the Voynich? If the vernacular herbal is not the Voynich what indication do you think it could provide as to whether Averlino is the author of the Voynich even if you locate the vernacular herbal?
I do agree that the quotation is the best place to start. If you can get a fuller context into the quote and also determine whether there is a better translation then you might at least be able to say whether that herbal looks more or less like the Voynich. Of course, unfortunately, given Covid, the archives are not functioning at their usual level.
The written in the “vernacular” as opposed to written in “cipher” has tended to strike me as a problem.
Mark: I never proposed that Averlino’s herbal was exactly the same as the Voynich Manuscript. What he claimed (indirectly) was that he had written a number of small books of secrets, including a book on agriculture: and so it would seem logical to conclude that the book on plants written elegantly in the vernacular was probably that book on agriculture.
I’m planning to draw up a shortlist of Tuscan mss from that period, to see if any can be identified as Averlino’s book. What happens from there on would be in the lap (top) of the gods… 🙂
A belated Happy New Year, Nick.
My main Voynich plans for this year are things that I wanted to do or should have done in 2020, but didn’t get round to.
Finish a longish piece of writing I should have done last year…
Write a paper on progress in transliteration. There’s a lot of material I have not yet made available and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense without the accompanying publication. This will have to come after the above.
Finally figure out how and where Voynich got the MS, by a trip to Rome, which was firmly planned for last Summer but had to be cancelled for rather obvious reasons. Same with option 2 in October/November.
But there’s something else. This year’s ‘Histocrypt’ should have been in London and I was firmly planning to attend. Now it has moved to Amsterdam, and will take place in September. In London there would have been a great opportunity to set up a Voynich meeting, and that opportunity still exists for Amsterdam. Of course, we don’t know if we will then be in Covid wave 4, or there is a new virus…
Nick – is there a bit more context for that allusion said to be by Alberto, in what may now be “the manuscript formerly known as MS Ashburnham 198”?
As it stands, I’m left unsure whether that quoted “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter” mightn’t mean just “…but of this [item/subject/theme] Philarete has already written more elegantly in the common tongue” .. a fairly routine equivalent to the modern footnote as excuse for not having to reproduce information.
I may be misunderstanding the Latin, of course.
So – is there anything to give that brief sentence more context?
Oh – and Nick, Ashburnham was one of those bibliophiles to whom the fine mathematician and not-so-fine con-artist Guglielmo Libri sold many volumes. You may find more details for that ‘Ashburnham mss’ in one of the sale catalogues.