My concern with Brumbaugh’s example, however, is that he appears to be using the explanation of alternate spellings as a justification for why his substitution system only worked on the first few labels and then failed to generalize to the rest of the labels (or to the other text on the page).

“Solutions” that work for five or six (or even a dozen) words and then peter out need to be examined more fully before the person claims decipherment. His solution arguably did not work even for five or six words, since 1) he had to assign four different letters to one VMS glyph to get something intelligible out of them as a group, 2) claimed that the first label was misspelled, and 3) couldn’t match the results to any known star-name system and thus rationalized that it must be an “alternate” system.

It’s not uncommon for one-to-many and many-to-one relationships to exist in ciphertext, but if the mapping of these relationships is correct, then larger blocks of text should be amenable to decipherment and I don’t see that happening with Brumbaugh’s system.

Averroes spelled ‘Averes’ is attested as late as the end of the 18thC.

see e.g. Über die Seele (1794) p.257. The script is old German Gothic, but not too difficult and I’ve checked to see if it’s available online. Nothing at the internet archive but today, at least, that page is visible through G/books.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been hoping for in proposing we start a new heading at voynich.ninja to explain and discuss previously-offered decipherments.

Everyone hears about Brumbaugh, but few are able to get a clear idea of either what he said, or why his claimed decipherments are not employed today.

The ‘old-timers’ know this, but no-one else does unless they go and re-invent the wheel. Posts like yours (and hopefully more in a central spot like voynich.ninja) may save countless ‘groundhog day’ episodes in future. And who knows? It may even turn out, one day, that someone had it almost right. 🙂

As you may know, association between a star and a historically-attested name is not a mad idea. Also Brumbaugh’s speaking of ‘souls’ may be a reference back to Newbold, who was looking into Neo-Pythagorean thought, to judge by a letter he sent asking assistance from Franciscan scholars. (This may be how Fr. Theodore Petersen became involved after 1921).

It’s also a neat way of avoiding the anchronisms and over-literalisms which offer such an easy route to error. 🙂