Answer · Voynich Manuscript
Latin or Italian under the Naibbe cipher
The text is Latin or Italian enciphered with the Naibbe cipher as Greshko published it, or with a Naibbe key of the same structure: plaintext respaced into single letters and letter pairs, each written from one of six tables of glyph strings chosen by card draws.
Where it stands
Still possibleTwo pieces of evidence for, three against. It needs two reviews to be accepted.
What it predicts
- Ciphertexts made with the published tables and laid into the manuscript's pages fall inside the manuscript's values on the T15 battery and the layout statistics (|z| <= 2 against 30 corpora), at least for Currier B, which the tables were designed against.
- A key of Naibbe structure fitted on the training quires reads the held-out quires as Latin or Italian: held-out letter-model score within the planted-key control's range and dictionary coverage above the word-shuffled null by more than the control's margin.
What would rule it out
- The published cipher misses the manuscript on statistics its design cannot reach (vocabulary richness, word-order information, page locality, line-position effects) for every plaintext tried.
- A Naibbe-structured solver that recovers planted keys on Latin and Italian finds nothing on the manuscript that it does not also find on the manuscript's own words shuffled.
Evidence 2 for · 3 against
AGAINST
Tested by 13 runs
| Run | Measured | Result | Against | Decision | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Run | h2 glyph units / H1 glyph units / mean word length / share of 10 commonest words: manuscript vs Naibbe mean | h2 2.105 vs 2.167; H1 3.845 vs 3.851; mean length 4.66 vs 4.80; top-10 0.147 vs 0.152 | Plain Latin in the same lines: h2 3.349 · H1 3.973 · mean length 5.61 · top-10 0.128 | Close but outside the spread (z -12, -3, -13, -3): the cipher moves Latin most of the way to the manuscript's glyph statistics, as Greshko reports, without matching them | |
| Run | statistics (of 21: T15 FIT and HELD, layout MI first/last, glyph H1, word-length sd, top-10 share) with |z| > 2 | whole book: 20/20/20 of 21 (genre Latin / Pliny 16 / Dante); Currier B: 20/20/19; Currier A: 19/19/19 | Plain Latin of the genres in the same lines: 20 (book), 17 (B), 21 (A) | Not supported: the published cipher reproduces the manuscript on no statistic except repeated 4-word phrases (rare in both) and, for A and for Dante on B, the top-10 word share | |
| Run | MI(line position; first glyph) / MI(line position; last glyph) / JS divergence of line-initial first glyphs, bits | Currier B: 0.133 / 0.062 / 0.264 vs Naibbe 0.001 / 0.001 / 0.001. Whole book: 0.112 / 0.056 / 0.198 vs 0.001 / 0.001 / 0.001 | Plain Latin in the same lines: 0.002 / 0.001 / 0.002 | Fails, as it must: no step of the cipher depends on the line, so it has none of the manuscript's line-edge layer (S-007, 46 rules) | |
| Run | adjacent-page vocabulary z / Spearman(form, context) / near-twin rate within 10 words / MI last glyph to next first glyph (bits) | Currier B: locality 8.93 vs 1.11; coupling 0.144 vs 0.014; near-twins 0.263 vs 0.142; edge MI 0.265 vs 0.010. Whole book: 16.2 vs 1.7; 0.149 vs 0.019; 0.262 vs 0.140; 0.212 vs 0.008 | Plain Latin of the genres in the same lines (Currier B): locality 7.89, coupling 0.036, near-twins 0.056, edge MI 0.049 | Fails (z 27, 12, 52, 297 on B). The plaintext has topical page structure (plain Latin locality 7.9, the manuscript 8.9); after Naibbe encipherment almost none survives (1.1), because card-drawn homophones and random respacing break every recurrence of a plaintext word | |
| Run | share of word types seen once (hapax) / bits per word saved by word order / repeated 3-word phrases / word-length sd | Currier B: hapax 0.693 vs 0.452; order gain 0.314 vs 0.125; repeated 3-grams 103 vs 27; length sd 1.69 vs 1.51. Whole book: hapax 0.705 vs 0.393; order gain 0.404 vs 0.143; 3-grams 145 vs 56; sd 1.77 vs 1.51 | Plain Latin in the same lines (Currier B): hapax 0.633, order gain 1.73, 3-grams 1,097, sd 2.57 | Fails (z 33, 8, 16, 22 on B): the cipher's vocabulary is too closed (too few one-off words) and its word sequence carries even less information than the manuscript's, whose weak word order is itself far below Latin | |
| Run | held-out gap (nats/letter) / dict5 | whole book, Italian: 1.622 / 0.009 (shuffled 1.618 / 0.013). Currier B only: Latin 1.389 / 0.034; Italian 1.709 / 0.012 | Italian control: 0.069 / 0.443 | Not supported: Italian does no better on the real word order than on the shuffle, and restricting to Currier B, the pages the tables were built for, does not help | |
| Run | held-out gap (nats/letter) / dict5 / restart agreement, manuscript vs its words shuffled across the book | manuscript: gap 1.231, 1.222, 1.259; dict5 0.040, 0.038, 0.042; agreement 0.40, 0.38, 0.45. Shuffled: gap 1.299, 1.279, 1.242; dict5 0.033, 0.030, 0.040; agreement 0.44, 0.36, 0.36 | Planted-key control: gap -0.018, dict5 0.543, agreement 0.997 · permuted fitted key: gap 2.79-3.06 | Not supported: the held-out gap is 1.2 nats/letter worse than the control and no better than on the order-free shuffle (mean difference 0.04, ranges overlap); dictionary coverage equals the shuffle's; restarts do not agree on a key | |
| Run | held-out letters decoded correctly / held-out gap (nats/letter) / dict5 / restart agreement | Latin: 98.0 % / -0.018 / 0.543 / 0.997. Italian: 99.1 % / 0.069 / 0.443 / 1.000 | Same key with letters permuted within each class: gap 2.93 (Latin), 3.31 (Italian) · dict5 0.003, 0.001 | Control passes: the solver recovers a Naibbe key from ciphertext alone and the key read on the held-out quires gives the plaintext | |
| Run | tokens that are a unigram type or split into prefix + suffix / of which unigram types / word types that parse | whole book 78.2 % (41.7 % unigram), types 36.5 %; Currier B 81.3 % (47.0 %); Currier A 72.4 % (30.8 %) | Naibbe ciphertext 100 % (about 47 % unigram) · plain Latin 2 % | Descriptive: a fifth of the running text is outside the cipher's word grammar | |
| Run | held-out statistics (of 12) with |z| > 2 for each section's best variant, re-scored on fresh seeds | text B 5 (stay95, codebook, shuffle, layer); herbal B 6 (stay90, codebook, layer); pharmaceutical A 7 (per-unit, codebook, layer); stars B 8 (per-unit, codebook, layer); herbal A 9 (stay50, codebook, layer); biological B 10 (stay95, shuffle, layer) | Picked from the grid on the selection seeds: 4, 5, 7, 8, 7, 9 · plain Latin in the same pages 9-12 · the section's words shuffled across its pages 10-12 | Not supported: no variant reproduces any section; the best settings differ by section and lose one to two statistics on fresh seeds | |
| Run | burst_z (topical clustering of the 200 commonest words over pages, no page order used) | manuscript: stars B 38.7, biological B 17.2, herbal A 15.2, text B 14.1, herbal B 6.3, pharmaceutical A 6.0. Naibbe per unit (published) -0.7 to 2.2; keep table p = 0.90: 3.4 to 13.5; p = 0.95: 6.8 to 28.3; p = 0.99: 39 to 94; one table per page: 87 to 265 | Plain Latin and published Naibbe · the section's own words shuffled across pages give 0 by construction | Partly supported: keeping a table for about 10 to 20 draws (p 0.90 to 0.95) gives every section its page clustering, which the published per-unit draw cannot | |
| Run | MI between a word's last glyph and the next word's first (edge MI, bits); share of words with a one-glyph variant within the next 10 words (twin10); edge MI on word bodies | edge MI: manuscript 0.19-0.32 by section, the 72 variants 0.01-0.10; on bodies 0.11-0.27 against 0.01-0.12. twin10: manuscript 0.24-0.33, variants 0.13-0.19 | The section's own words shuffled across its pages: edge MI 0.02-0.08, twin10 0.18-0.27 | Not supported: no variant in any section comes within the spread on either statistic | |
| Run | share of words beginning with the four commonest glyphs / entropy of word-initial glyphs (bits) | top-4 share manuscript vs Naibbe: stars B 0.644 vs 0.638, pharmaceutical A 0.661 vs 0.650, text B 0.616 vs 0.632, biological B 0.688 vs 0.637, herbal B 0.603 vs 0.644, herbal A 0.596 vs 0.642. Whole book: o 20 %, ch 16 %, q 16 %, d 9 % begin words (61 %); qo- 15 % | Plain Latin: top-4 share about 0.37, entropy 4.05 bits | Descriptive: the cipher reproduces the concentrated word openings within |z| 2 in three of six sections; it is not where Naibbe fails, and removing first glyphs does not rescue the statistics it misses |
The questions it answers
Most likelyNo answer ahead
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Latin or Italian under the Naibbe cipher [Answer ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF
@misc{mysteriesdept_ans0dc7pmx4xwzf,
title = {Latin or Italian under the Naibbe cipher},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Answer, catalog key ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF}
}