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The leading theory seems to be that it's meaningless gibberish, in part because asserting that it isn't requires some degree of specificity as to what it could

The leading theory seems to be that it's meaningless gibberish, in part because asserting that it isn't requires some degree of specificity as to what it could be, and there's little agreement on that aspect. Which is to say, it's the plurality theory but far from the majority theory. It's also known that the text makes no sense as an encipherment known in the 17th century of any known natural language. Statistical analysis of features suggests it's not random gibberish... but also distinguish it from natural language. It's also prone to a high degree of repetition or near-repetition (think phrases like "burgle bugle bugie", with one-letter changes between successive words). Personally, I think it's gibberish that was constructed to have some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst. Or maybe even something as prosaically simple as calligraphy practice, given the unnaturally repetitive nature of a lot of the text.

alganet 2y ago
Morse, ASCII and military phonetic transcribed literally (just to cite a non-machine one) all look like repetitive gibberish if you don't know what to look for.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Morse, ASCII, and military phonetic are all pretty recognizable as single-unit substitution ciphers. We've pretty much ruled out any possibility of it being a single-unit substitution cipher of any known language.
nkoren 2y ago
> some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst But that's a very ahistorical theory, isn't it? The manuscript was written hundreds of years before cryptanalysts were invented. For its author to anticipate that would have required an impossible degree of foresight. Rather, whatever features give it cryptographically interesting properties must have been motivated by something other than a desire to confuse/intrigue cryptanalysts, with that just being a coincidental side-effect.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  Of course not, there were scholars focused on analyzing and decrypting encrypted texts in Roman Empire and probably earlier.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Monoalphabetic ciphers are commonly referred to as "Caesar ciphers"... because Caesar used them. Presumably the concept of a coded message followed pretty rapidly after the invention of the written message.

alganet 2y ago

Morse, ASCII and military phonetic transcribed literally (just to cite a non-machine one) all look like repetitive gibberish if you don't know what to look for.

jcranmer 2y ago
Morse, ASCII, and military phonetic are all pretty recognizable as single-unit substitution ciphers. We've pretty much ruled out any possibility of it being a single-unit substitution cipher of any known language.

nkoren 2y ago

> some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst But that's a very ahistorical theory, isn't it? The manuscript was written hundreds of years before cryptanalysts were invented. For its author to anticipate that would have required an impossible degree of foresight. Rather, whatever features give it cryptographically interesting properties must have been motivated by something other than a desire to confuse/intrigue cryptanalysts, with that just being a coincidental side-effect.

throwaway48540 2y ago
Of course not, there were scholars focused on analyzing and decrypting encrypted texts in Roman Empire and probably earlier.
tptacek 2y ago
Monoalphabetic ciphers are commonly referred to as "Caesar ciphers"... because Caesar used them. Presumably the concept of a coded message followed pretty rapidly after the invention of the written message.