Overview
- Independent researcher Michael A. Greshko describes the Naibbe cipher in Cryptologia, modeling how Latin or Italian could be enciphered into Voynich-like writing.
- Naibbe is a verbose homophonic substitution system that maps letters to multiple Voynich-style glyph strings and assembles words with slot-grammar rules seen in the manuscript.
- The procedure uses period-appropriate randomness with dice and playing cards, with documented variants based on 52-card and 78-card decks known in 15th‑century Europe.
- Generated texts mirror several Voynich signatures, including symbol frequencies, word-length distributions, positional glyph patterns, and recurring micro-sequences, though replication remains incomplete.
- Greshko stresses the approach is not a decryption, and outside experts such as René Zandbergen urge caution and further computational testing to evaluate how well the method matches the manuscript.