The “table and grille” methode
It is one of Gordon’s work attitudes to search for solutions in a highly practical way. So, he tried to simulate the situation the Voynich manuscript creator was in as good as possible. Using ink and a quill, he wrote words in the Voynich script on old paper. While producing letter sequences in this traditional way, he kept thinking what kind of method somebody in such a situation could have used to fill a book with text that was not meant to have a meaning.
After a while, Gordon came up with a method that seemed to work. He started with a table of short, meaningless letter blocks, like the following:
Then he took a grille (consisting of three frames), moved it over the table and in each position wrote down the framed letters:
The meaningless text derived in this example is: “yche qotdy kdy.” To produce a longer text, one can use different grilles and move them in different ways. To get a text resembling the one in the Voynich manuscript, Voynichese letters must be used, of course, like in the following picture taken from Gordon’s publication:
Gordon’s “table and grille” method is also explained in the following video (starting at 1:58):
It is clear that this text generation method was easy to apply, even 500 years ago and that it could easily be used to produce a very long text. While such a text doesn’t have a meaning, it certainly has at a basic resemblance with real language.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
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Further reading: Voynich manuscript: 898 official replicas and one unofficial one
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