Evidence · Voynich Manuscript

Naibbe ciphertext comes close on glyph statistics and word length, best for Currier B

The published Naibbe cipher moves Latin and Italian most of the way to the manuscript's glyph statistics, word length and commonest words, most closely for Currier B.

Supported0

What it means

Key questionWhat kind of text is it?

Most likely: a notation or memory system

Most likelyunchanged

Part of itIs it a cipher of a known language?

Partly answered

Most likelyunchanged

Answer this evidence bears onLatin or Italian under the Naibbe cipher

Supports2 for, 3 against

Still possibleunchanged

Next steps 5

T39, second round of the section-level grid: add the two mechanisms that produce what T38 cannot reach. (a) Re-spacing: write the cipher as a continuous glyph stream and place spaces by a rule (after word-final glyphs such as -y, -n, -r, -l, before q-, ch-, d-), so word edges depend on neighbouring glyphs (T15's re-spaced stream gave edge MI 0.22). (b) Local copying: with probability p the next word is a one-glyph variant of a word among the last w (self-citation), for the near-twins. Cross with the T38 table-stay knob and the line layer, confirm best settings on fresh seeds.

~8 h

On: Is it a cipher of a known language?

—not judged

Naibbe-type key over glyph strings learned from the manuscript rather than Greshko's inventory (which reads 78 % of tokens), with whole-word signs for common words, validated on planted keys first. It would also have to keep page locality, which letter-level homophones erase (M-T36).

~16 h

On: Is it a cipher of a known language?

—not judged

Codebook attack: group one-glyph variant families that share contexts, then align the manuscript's co-occurrence structure with Latin texts of the same genres (unsupervised lexicon induction: embedding alignment, graph matching). Validate on a planted Latin codebook with variants laid into the same pages first.

~20 h

On: Is it a cipher of a known language?

—not judged

Section-level key search: run the M-T37 solver within single sections (training and held-out pages alternating by bifolio), so a key need not hold across sections whose order and scribes differ.

~6 h

On: Is it a cipher of a known language?

—not judged

Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takesAll 5 on the question

Sources 2

The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich manuscript-like ciphertext

G 2025

SRC

greshko/naibbe-cipher: Python implementations of the Naibbe cipher and Voynichesque, decryption script and figure data

Greshko 2025

SRC

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). Naibbe ciphertext comes close on glyph statistics and word length, best for Currier B [Evidence EVD0DC7R7AX3PKB]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DC7R7AX3PKB

@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dc7r7ax3pkb,
  title     = {Naibbe ciphertext comes close on glyph statistics and word length, best for Currier B},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DC7R7AX3PKB},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DC7R7AX3PKB}
}