Over the next few weeks, I plan to introduce and discuss a number of candidate blocks from the Voynich Manuscript. (3) attempt to reverse-engineer the way that the two blocks map to each other.Īs such, the Block Paradigm is entirely neutral about whether Voynichese is a cipher, a shorthand or an unusual language (or any combination of the three): the purpose of the first two stages is to get us to the point that researchers can attempt to do the reverse-engineering third stage for a given block with reasonable confidence that they may have something that could well be the plaintext. (2) find possible matches for them in other manuscripts and then finally (1) identify blocks of the plaintext that stand some chance of appearing in other manuscripts That is, the idea is to use three stages: My working title for this new way of thinking about the Voynich Manuscript is the “Block Paradigm”, because as its target it seeks to identify not a letter, a word or even a language, but a block of text. (This has basically been why Cipher Mysteries has been so quiet as far as the Voynich Manuscript goes.) Hence I’ve spent most of this year trying to work out what that new paradigm should be, and to find a good way of communicating it. With all the above in mind, it became apparent to me a while back that what was actually missing was an entire paradigm, by which I mean a complete and systematic way of thinking about what we are trying to do with Voynich research, with what tools, and for what purpose. So… if they don’t work, what’s the alternative? Ay, there’s the rub. They have not worked, do not work and never will work for it: hopefully that’s a clear enough position statement. Please understand that I’m not saying that these two paradigms are worthless in all circumstances: rather, I’m saying as flatly and directly as I can that though they do have great value in other contexts, they are essentially worthless when applied to the Voynich Manuscript. Moreover, by spamming people with the results of your research, you’re wasting their time too. Yet high quality scans, several decades of study and the Internet’s million eyeballs have not yet yielded insights significantly beyond what Friedman and Tiltman managed.Īnd so we fast forward to 2014, where researchers continue to adopt one of two basic paradigms: (a) that Voynichese uses an unknown cipher, and so we must grind through an endless series of statistical tests that must surely eventually isolate an answer, and (b) that Voynichese is written in an unknown language, and so we must extract a set of individual word cribs to identify the language’s family etc.Īfter a lot of consideration, my opinion is that the Voynich Manuscript laughs in the face of both approaches: and that if you’re using either (or indeed both) of them, you’re almost certainly wasting your time. If Voynichese was ‘gettable’, Friedman and then Brigadier John Tiltman (who I personally place right up there with Friedman) would surely have got it, or would have begun to get it: but neither did. How are we ever going to resolve the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript?Įven sixty years ago, it was abundantly clear to William Friedman (widely believed to be the greatest ever codebreaker) that the Voynich’s cipher/language was of a different type to anything that had previously been encountered, and that normal cryptanalytical tools would be of little use in revealing its secrets.
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