A question about Robert Brumbaugh on the voynich.ninja forum caught my attention, so I searched out a published article about his decipherment of Voynich Manuscript star names. In Brumbaugh’s article, he refers to the nymphs in the zodiac-symbols section as “souls” and proposes glyph-to-numbers-to-alphabet substitution to interpret the labels. To demonstrate his system, he deciphers folio 70v with the two fish (Pisces).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
T<\/span>his commentary is a response to Brumbaugh’s 1976 article, \u201cThe Voynich \u2018Roger Bacon\u2019 Cipher Manuscript: Deciphered Maps of Stars\u201d published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes<\/cite>.<\/p>\n
The Basic System<\/h4>\n
First Brumbaugh assumes the VMS is a natural-language substitution code and converts the VMS glyphs to numbers, then converts them to letters (without any interim processing). If he were adding or multiplying or otherwise processing the numbers, then numeric conversion might be necessary, but since he’s proposing nothing more than a substitution system, he could just as easily have gone straight from glyphs to letters without the unnecessary interim step.<\/p>\n
That’s not my main criticism, however. The extra step might be a practical adaptation for feeding Voynich glyphs into a computer and doesn’t affect the outcome, which is the most important thing. Unfortunately, Brumbaugh’s system takes so many liberties with interpretation of the glyph-numbers, it comes across as a theory-driven decipherment rather than objective cryptanalysis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Brumbaugh begins with the premise that<\/span><\/span> the labels are star names, even though his decipherment does not match any well-known star-name systems currently used or cited in medieval texts. His explanation for this is that they must be names for a proposed system, or what he calls “alternate astrolabe nomenclature”.<\/p>\n
He then describes his substitution system, which first converts VMS glyphs to numbers and then provides alternate character-interpretations for each number:<\/p>\n