How to decipher the MS?

[magnesium]

For example, imagine that the Naibbe cipher was used to encode the Voynich MS, but we didn't know that. So, we just isolated the most common substrings and ran the decoding matching just these elements to Latin bigrams/trigrams, then with some probability we'll get most of the first table of the Naibbe scheme, that corresponds to 5/13 of the plaintext. If we uncover 5/13 of the plaintext, it would be immediately obvious that there are a lot of coherent grammatically correct snippets, too many for this to be coincidental. With this we can get enough context to deduce the rest of the scheme. Only after that we will be able to identify the way the statistics of the Voynichese emerge from the Naibbe cipher.

One of the reasons why I created the Naibbe cipher is to provide a sandbox in which to test these kinds of ideas. The Naibbe cipher is a fully functional cipher that by design does a good job of replicating many, but not all, word-level VMS properties. What happens when we analyze Naibbe ciphertexts as if we don't know how the cipher worked, and then we peek under the hood to see why we obtained the results we obtained? I'd encourage you to attempt this very analysis on the 20 reference Naibbe ciphertexts I have provided.