  The Voynich MS is an illustrated 15th century manuscript, whose text is
written in an unknown alphabet, which has not been translated until today. In
2004 Gordon Rugg published a paper in which he proposed that this text is
likely to be meaningless, and could have been composed by an alternative
application of a so-called Cardan Grille, namely by moving a piece of cardboard
with holes over a large table of word fragments, and writing down the words
that thus appear. This paper caused considerable discussion in the circles of
people interested in the Voynich MS text, but it has not found many followers,
even until today. The present paper takes a closer look at the mechanics of
this method. Based on this, a more generic method is proposed, which is
considerably simpler, both to set up and to execute. It is shown that the
unusual word length distribution of the Voynich MS, which is very close to
binomial, could be a consequence of the application of such a method.
Furthermore, it is argued that this method could not only be used to create
meaningless text, but also to encode meaningful text. A first high-level
analysis looks at whether such a method could indeed have been applied to
create the Voynich MS text, but this is certainly far from conclusive. The main
aim of this paper is to inspire further research of the Voynich MS text into a
new direction that has not yet been explored in great detail.
