Scientist created a cipher that writes the indecipherable language of the Voynich Manuscript

A researcher proposes a new cipher that transforms Latin and Italian texts into something that closely resembles the Voynich Manuscript, the famous “indecipherable book written in a language that does not exist with never-before-seen creatures.”

A recent one, published in the magazine Cryptologiapresents what the author calls the Naibbe figurea manual substitution cipher system that, as demonstrated, is capable of taking Latin and Italian texts and converting them into a jumble apparently meaningless which replicates, in a surprising way, the characteristics of the famous and indecipherable .

The cipher, developed by the independent investigator, is not a solution to the manuscript’s centuries-old enigma, but a proof of concept: demonstrates that it is plausible that Voynich is in fact a cipher text, not plain nonsense text or an artificial language, as has also been proposed.

The Manuscript, , is kept at Yale University. It is a book from the 15th century, until now never deciphered, filled with strange plant illustrationsastronomical diagrams and human figures in bizarre poses.

But what truly made it famous is the text: written with unique characters, the so-called “voyniches“, looks like a languagebut no one has ever managed to read it.

For centuries, cryptographers, linguists and historians have debated whether this is a secret code, from the writing of a lost language or simply a very elaborate fraud.

In his study, Greshko focuses on the so-called “cryptogram hypothesis“: the idea that Voynich is a tquite normal, probably in a European language of the time, such as Latin or Italian, which has been encrypted to hide its content.

The great challenge of this hypothesis has always been finding a historically plausible encryption method that produces a text with all the oddities non-Voynich observed statistics.

The Naibbe cipher, named after a 14th-century Italian term for a card game, is a system that can be executed entirely by handwith materials available in the 15th century: pen, paper, dice and a deck of cards.

For a legitimate recipient, decoding an encrypted message is systematic. First, it consults a decoding table to see if each “word” in the cryptogram corresponds to one of the words reserved for that cipher. If it doesn’t match, it assumes it’s a bigram — a sequence of two consecutive units, usually two letters.

A internal grammar of the Naibbe cipherbased on previous work on the Voynich structure, facilitates the identification of where the prefix ends and the suffix begins within a word, explains: prefixes use one set of characters and suffixes another, functioning as natural “markers” for those who know the system.

In his article, Greshko includes examples of application of his cipher, including the first verse of Virgil’s Aeneid“Arms and men sing“, and the beginning of “Commentaries on the French War“, o firsthand account of Julius Caesar about the Gallic Wars — transformed into something that closely resembles “voynichês”.

O “Commentaries on the French War” encrypted by Greshko It actually seems like something that could have been written in “voynichese”. For anyone who knows the key used by the investigator to encrypt it, it will be easy to decipher it.

The Voynich Manuscript, however, will probably remain indecipherable. The study of Greshko demonstrates that it is probably a ciphertext and not some meaningless gibberish. But, without knowing the cipher key used to encrypt it, it is unlikely that we will ever know its contents.