Comment by brig90

That’s a really interesting question — and one I’ve been circling in the back of my head, honestly. I’m not a cryptographer, so I can’t speak to how feasible a brute-force approach is at scale, but the idea of mapping each Voynich “word” to a real word in another language and optimizing for coherence definitely lines up with some of the more experimental approaches people have tried.

The challenge (as I understand it) is that the vocabulary size is pretty massive — thousands of unique words — and the structure might not be 1:1 with how real language maps. Like, is a “word” in Voynich really a word? Or is it a chunk, or a stem with affixes, or something else entirely? That makes brute-forcing a direct mapping tricky.

That said… using cluster IDs instead of individual word (tokens) and scoring the outputs with something like a language model seems like a pretty compelling idea. I hadn’t thought of doing it that way. Definitely some room there for optimization or even evolutionary techniques. If nothing else, it could tell us something about how “language-like” the structure really is.

Might be worth exploring — thanks for tossing that out, hopefully someone with more awareness or knowledge in the space see's it!