Experimenting with a method for
identifying Cardan Grille cipher words
Some have wondered if
the Voynich may have been created with the Cardan Grille
method, either
containing real information, or more famously, that
it does not. I
don't know one way or the other, but I did wonder if there would be a
way to determine which "words" would be the original text, and which
would be filler.
I first looked at the simplest
case, in which a grill would be used to place the original content as
words. Created this way, the original text would be forced into the
positions of the holes in the grill. This would mean that if one had
two or more pages to compare, the positions of the original text (not
the content) would be the same in all pages... with the "filler" text
varying in position, length and height.
So along this line of thought,
I came up with the below method. I'm sure there is a whole science
about cracking grille ciphers, and perhaps something like this is
done... or some other method which studies placement. I have not found
it yet, and so if anyone knows of such a method, please write me.
The first step was to mark out
the positions of all words on the first six lines of two pages. If it
seemed to be a workable method, I could then do entire pages. I made
each box just large enough to allow for all of the characters in each
word to fit, even if they went far beyond the word. To discriminate
between the boxes for each page, I made one red and the other, blue. To
be able to separate out the information I added and subtracted, I used
additional layers in each image. Here is the first six lines of f104r:
And here are the first six lines of f104v:
And below are these two samples with the Voynich images removed:
On the blue (f104v) example, the words bent because of the folding of
the page, causing their position to different than they were in
reality... I excluded them for that reason, and traced lines where they
had been. After getting my two word size/position examples, I merged
them into one. I then moved one over the other, until I seemed to have
the best alignment. Interestingly, the best match of all word sizes
which were anywhere near their relative placements on both pages, was
the first word:
The green rectangles are marking where the red and blue word rectangles
aligned well enough to suggest a possible grille opening. I could then
remove the red and blue, and I was left with the suggested grill
openings:
This is just an experiment to try the method, and look for
improvements. I have no reason to believe that the Voynich was created
with a grille, or that such a grille would be used without rotating (as
it usually is, I understand), or
used with words and not letters, or that an enciphered would even use
the same grill on different pages. It is just an experiment to try out
the method in it's simplest form. In this form, all it would tell you
the approximate common positions of words across multiple pages, and as
such, where a hypothetical grill would have it's holes. It would not, I
don't think, tell one whether a grill was used or not. Unless, of
course, the same positions, and only those positions, repeated over
some larger number of sample pages.
H. Rich SantaColoma
