# Latin or Italian under the Naibbe cipher

> Still possible: The text is Latin or Italian enciphered with the Naibbe cipher as Greshko published it, or with a Naibbe key of the same structure…

Source: https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/answers/ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF/latin-or-italian-under-the-naibbe-cipher  
Publisher: Mysteries Department  
Licence: CC BY 4.0 (credit Mysteries Department and link the page)  

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[Questions](https://mysteriesdept.com/questions)[Voynich Manuscript](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript)[Is it a cipher of a known language?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/questions/QST08JG2PB04SQP/is-it-a-cipher-of-a-known-language)Answer

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.

**Still possible** Answers **1** question0

## Where it stands

**Still possible** Two 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

[Keeping one Naibbe table for 10 to 20 draws gives the manuscript's page clustering](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/evidence/EVD0DC8YQ56CYPZ/keeping-one-naibbe-table-for-10-to-20-draws-gives-the)

Suggestive

FOR

[Naibbe ciphertext comes close on glyph statistics and word length, best for Currier B](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/evidence/EVD0DC7R7AX3PKB/naibbe-ciphertext-comes-close-on-glyph-statistics-and-word)

Supported

FOR

[A Naibbe key search that recovers planted keys finds no reading of the manuscript](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/evidence/EVD0DC7R8DGCH2E/a-naibbe-key-search-that-recovers-planted-keys-finds-no)

Supported

AGAINST

[No Naibbe-family variant reaches the edge dependency or near-twins in any section](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/evidence/EVD0DC8YPZGAWSV/no-naibbe-family-variant-reaches-the-edge-dependency-or-near)

Supported

AGAINST

[Published Naibbe misses 19 to 20 of 21 statistics for every plaintext](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/evidence/EVD0DC7R7VKE97F/published-naibbe-misses-19-to-20-of-21-statistics-for-every)

Established

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

[Is it a cipher of a known language?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/questions/QST08JG2PB04SQP/is-it-a-cipher-of-a-known-language)

Part of [What kind of text is it?](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/questions/QST08JG1S1G6D9T/what-kind-of-text-is-it)

Most likelyNo answer ahead

## Cite it

```
Mysteries Department. (2026). Latin or Italian under the Naibbe cipher [Answer ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/ANS0DC7PMX4XWZF
```

Key

**ANS** 0DC7PMX4XWZF

Kind

Answer · hypothesis

Proposed

[Session 11](https://mysteriesdept.com/mysteries/voynich-manuscript/sessions/SES0DCDMFZAWWNC/session-11-the-naibbe-cipher-tested-section-level-hyper) · 28 Oct 2026

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