A researcher has developed a cipher that may present insights into how medieval scribes produced the Voynich Manuscript’s unreadable writing.
Created within the early fifteenth century, and infrequently known as the world’s most mysterious manuscript, the Voynich Manuscript bears uncommon illustrations and illegible writing in a singular script. When statistically analysed, “Voynichese”—because the script is thought—displays some traits of a typical language, however in different methods, behaves surprisingly. This has led consultants to argue that its textual content may very well be an unknown or synthetic language, gibberish, or a cipher.
Now, the science journalist Michael A. Greshko has developed an encoding methodology that replicates among the uncommon options of “Voynichese”. He has known as this the Naibbe cipher, after a card sport recognized in Italy in 1377.
“This encoding methodology results in a decipherable secret message consisting of ‘phrases’ whose inner constructions, lengths, and frequencies replicate what’s noticed inside parts of the Voynich Manuscript,” says Greshko, the creator of a analysis paper printed within the journal Cryptologia.
“The Naibbe cipher is my try and discover a strategy to encode one thing like Latin by hand as textual content that partially mimics the Voynich Manuscript’s unusual properties. The cipher works by randomly breaking a textual content into chunks which are one or two letters lengthy.
“The cipher then disguises these chunks as Voynichese phrases, by encoding particular person letters as teams of Voynichese glyphs by the usage of six completely different substitution tables. To reliably be certain that these tables are chosen in sure common proportions, the Naibbe cipher makes use of a draw from a deck of enjoying playing cards to find out which desk encodes a given letter.”
When Greshko experimented together with his new encipherment methodology—for instance, encoding the beginning of Julius Caesar’s De bello Gallico—he discovered that the ensuing ciphertexts reproduced among the Voynich Manuscript’s uncommon options.
Nonetheless, he emphasises that the Naibbe cipher can’t be precisely how the Voynich Manuscript was made. It doesn’t replicate the entire manuscript’s necessary properties, and doesn’t conclusively show that the Voynich textual content should comprise which means.
The Naibbe cipher does, nevertheless, present a strategy to encode Latin and Italian in a Voynich-like approach, and it could assist consultants to slim down how medieval scribes may need created the Voynich Manuscript’s textual content.
“Linguistically talking, the Voynich Manuscript is as removed from most pure languages as London is from Sydney,” Greshko says. “Extending this analogy, the Naibbe cipher is like mapping one of many Silk Highway’s many potential land routes: an illustration that at the least a few of that huge linguistic distance may very well be navigable.”
