Repeating Words

Here are the repeating “words” where the word repeats more than twice on a line:

Folio 8v 1oe 1oe 1oe
Folio 40r oham oham oham
Folio 47r 1oe 1oe 1oe
Folio 75r 4ohc89 4ohc89 4ohc89
Folio 79v 4ohc89 4ohc89 4ohc89
Folio 81r oe oe oe
Folio 86v3 9kam 9kam 9kam
Folio 99v oe oe oe

Treating paragraphs (rather than just lines, so the repeats can stretch over a line break), then there is also:

Folio 75r 4ohc89 4ohc89 4ohc89 4ohc89
Folio 104v 2coe 2coe 2coe

Current Status

This is my personal summary of where I am at the moment, in particular which theories I’ve rejected (for better or worse!)

• Theory: VMs words are anagrams of a plaintext that has been enciphered into the VMs glyphs
  • Attempts to find solutions with many mappings (1- 2- 3-grams) and various languages/dictionaries fail to find even mediocre matches
  • Unusual prevalence of e.g. “8am 8am 8am” not explained by this theory
• Theory: VMs words are in fact pieces of plaintext words, that need to be a) combined b) deciphered
  • Trials with delimiters like VMs “o” and “9” and with many mappings and languages/dictionaries fail to find good matches
  • But this would explain “8am 8am 8am” at a stretch
• Theory: VMs words contain numeric codes, that use a Selenus type code table, with e.g. gallows characters used as multipliers
  • There are too many VMs characters: for this to work – only, say, 4 gallows characters and ten digits are needed for a minimal implementation – what are all the rest for?
  • Doesn’t explain “8am 8am 8am”
• Theory: VMs words are phonetic codes for a reading of the manuscript
  • Mapping the words to Soundex or Double Metaphone and comparing with plaintexts produces a poor frequency match (but is this a good test – see e.g. Robert Firth’s notes)
  • This could explain “8am 8am 8am”
• Theory: The text is produced by a polyalphabetic cipher with rotating/repeating sequences (a la Strong)
  • Multiple attempt to fit this theory using various alphabet lengths and sequence lengths fails to find a convincing match, although plausible results can be generated
  • Would explain “8am 8am 8am”
• Procedure: since the cipher/code/whatever it is changes at least between sections, and possibly between folios (and maybe even within a folio), examining large quantities of VMs text for statistical properties is very misleading. Only text within a single side of a folio should be tackled for decryption.