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The Naibbe cipher
- The Naibbe cipher
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RE: The Naibbe cipher
Mauro > 10-08-2025, 04:52 PM
(10-08-2025, 04:11 PM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Maoro,
I use You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the word is in my opinion "qeor"
on page 111 you are right. (but the word only exist 2x in this form in the manuscript)
both other words you mentioned doesn´t exist on voynichese.com
chch for sure doesn´t exist. Can you please check, too.
I only look at transcriptions, I'm surely not qualified to give opinions on the original script, and I always use RF1a-n.
(10-08-2025, 04:11 PM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I didn´t found in the manuscript two same latters single written, like aa, kk, ll
I would also like to use the site you mentioned to check the possibilities
I'd like to briefly understand how exactly you activate the search function on the site. Unfortunately, my PC doesn't search in the manuscript when I press Control F. Is there anything I should be aware of?
You use Ctrl-F to find words once you have opened the file which contains the transcription (ie. using BlockNotes or WordPad). I'm sorry but I don't have the link at hand for the RF1a-n file (I downloaded it some time ago), it's been posted multiple times on this forum, surely someone can pointi it out for you.
PS.: if you want to follow on this discussion (about the 'regularities') I think a new thread will be better, this thread here is for Naibbe cipher. -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
RobGea > 10-08-2025, 04:56 PM
voynichese.com uses the Takahashi Transcription. ( a commendable effort but TT has many errors and no coverage of the Rosette folio )
"Reference" transliteration file RF1a-n has been superceded by the current version RF1b-er ( basic ) or the full RF1b-e.txt.
direct link to the file -->You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Transliteration files can be found in Table8 on this page of voynich.nu >> Transliteration of the Text
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Ctrl-F refers to the 'Find' funtion in most text editors.
My bad 4 minutes too slow
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RE: The Naibbe cipher
Petrasti > 10-08-2025, 05:42 PM
Hi RobGea, thank you very much. I found an EVA file. It lists all the words transcribed in EVA without showing the "Voynich script."
I understand what Mauro means, but I can't find the word on voynichese.com. I guess we just have to accept the different perception in the script. We can move the discussion to a separate thread if we like. However, I thought it might have implications for the theory of suffixes and prefixes if the same words mostly exist without a gallow sign in the middle, too. -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
ReneZ > 11-08-2025, 12:30 AM
Note that the differences between RF1a and RF1b are very small, and for most purposes it does not matter which file one uses.
It only becomes important in case people want to compare results (to the last decimal place).
The transliteration at voynichese.com is quite different, though still easily good enough for most statistics.
It starts playing a role when trying to find individual words.
voynichese.com also lacks the entire rosettes page. -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
magnesium > 11-08-2025, 02:07 AM
(09-08-2025, 03:16 AM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Managed to get a prototype Python version up and running ... barely.
... need sleepz now.
Thank you for working on this! I am working on Python implementations of both the Naibbe cipher and Voynichesque, as well as a Python script that can perform automatic decryption of Naibbe ciphertexts. I hope to have those ready to share soon. -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
magnesium > 11-08-2025, 02:22 AM
(10-08-2025, 06:15 AM)Petrasti Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.good morgning, a quick comment on the regularity of Voynich. all words that have a gallow sign integrated into the letter cth cph ckh cph also exist withouth the gallow sing in the middle.
all words with an e, ee, eee, eeee in the word (and always and only after the first letter of a word) exist withouth the e in the manuscript. I question wether these theory of prefixes and suffixes could be used therefore?
Thanks for your question! Within the Naibbe cipher, the prefixes and suffixes used to encrypt plaintext bigrams are generated using a modified version of Massimilano Zattera's "slot grammar": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The specific modifications I have made can be seen in Tables 8 and 9 of my preprint, but with a few exceptions, we're taking Zattera's slots 0-5 and using them to generate one set of affixes (what I call type-1 affixes; Table 8), while Zattera's slots 6-11 generate another set of affixes (type-2 affixes; Table 9). Most bigram prefixes within the Naibbe cipher are type-1 affixes, while most bigram suffixes are type-2 affixes.
We generate a given affix for the Naibbe cipher by going left to right within one of these tables and using 0 or 1 glyph per slot for all of the slots.
We don't have to generate type-1 affixes that contain gallows or bench-and-gallows glyphs, nor do we have to generate type-2 affixes that contain e glyphs. I simply mentioned those as just two of the examples for why this splitting of Zattera's slot grammar works well for this cipher: gallows glyphs never appear in type-2 affixes, and e glyphs never appear in type-1 affixes. So within the Naibbe cipher, these and other "affix-exclusive" glyphs can be handy ways of telling where the prefix-suffix breakpoint might be within a token that encrypts a plaintext bigram. But these glyphs are not the only ways of telling where that breakpoint is. -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
anyasophira > 12-08-2025, 04:57 AM
I love this clever way of reverse engineering . It’s nice to show a cypher can look like voynichese and still have meaning behind it regardless if this is the real mechanism. I do have a couple questions and I did listen to your video. I read your paper and I read this thread and I’m really hoping I didn’t miss the answer somewhere. This is pretty hard stuff to follow and I thought I checked before I’m asking . If these have already been Addressed , just let me know and I will go answer my own questions by rereading ? .
Clusters and repetition: are you saying that this is a feature of an encrypted plaintext letter/bigram just so happen to repeat in the plaintext word and therefore looks like words and suffixes being repeated , when it’s just a few repeat plain letters? Or is it because the voynichese encryption “chunks”are similar making all plain text words become repetitive?
Does your system show that the same vords, glyphs and even bigrams like to cluster around line breaks? And places where the line ends?
Does your system start having certain bigrams trending more left or right (Like Patrick Feaster has demonstrated)
Your tables- now
I know you did not focus on actual translation but rather showing something that mimics parts of the Voynich but you do shows charts of plain text letter ratios that match the voynich Glyphs so I am asking how much of your tables are just placeholders for any Latin letter in order to model this approach and how much of this is your actual best guess of what the suffixes, prefixes and Unigrams could actually be in plaintext Latin or Italian. For example did you somewhat choose to map Eva M to a Latin letters that are not as common or is it literally all arbitrary? Or does your cypher fix that? Like it doesn’t matter that certain glyphs and bigrams outnumber others?
Anyways incredible work. Really interested how this continues as you fine tune it. I wish I head for math at times like this. -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
magnesium > 12-08-2025, 10:01 PM
(12-08-2025, 04:57 AM)anyasophira Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I love this clever way of reverse engineering . It’s nice to show a cypher can look a voynichese and still have meaning behind it regardless if this is the real mechanism. I do have a couple questions and I did listen to your video. I read your paper and I read this thread and I’m really hoping I didn’t miss the answer somewhere. This is pretty hard stuff to follow and I thought I checked before I’m asking . If these have already been Addressed , just let me know and I will go answer my own questions by rereading ? .
Clusters and repetition: are you saying that this is a feature of an encrypted plaintext letter/bigram just so happen to repeat in the plaintext word and therefore looks like words and suffixes being repeated , when it’s just a few repeat plain letters? Or is it because the voynichese encryption “chunks”are similar making all plain text words become repetitive?
Thank you! Before I provide an answer, I want to stress that the procedure of the Naibbe cipher—most notably the use of playing cards to enforce an approximate 5:2:2:2:1:1 set of ratios on a letter-by-letter basis—is meant to reliably achieve the average statistical behavior across all of Voynich B. It averages across several subsections of Voynich B that are meaningfully different from each other, such as the "biological" section versus the "stars" section. Locally, a specific tract of text could theoretically veer from the global average. Within a Naibbe ciphertext, there might be a portion of a page where there's more unigrams than bigrams, or a specific tract of text in which the secondary table Beta1 is used more often than Alpha, for example.
I also want to emphasize that the ratios might themselves represent the average encipherment choices/preferences of the Voynich B scribes (mostly Scribes 2 and 3 in Lisa Fagin Davis's analysis), perhaps looking up choices from tables or something like that without a formal, Naibbe-like card-drawing mechanism. For example, if multiple tables were in a small pamphlet, a scribe might happen to use the table on the front cover more often than a table on an internal page, without any process that formally and systematically skewed the probabilities of certain tables appearing on a letter-by-letter basis.
With that preamble out of the way: Within the Naibbe cipher, clusters of same-prefix tokens are reliably generated if one of the Naibbe cipher's 6 tables happens to be used frequently when encrypting a series of successive or close plaintext unigrams. That's because within a given table, most of the unigram word types start the same way. In principle, bigram word types could also contribute to clustering, in the sense that the prefix qok can appear in bigram word types, where it takes on a distinct meaning than it does in the specific word types reserved for unigrams.
Word repetition occurs most easily within the Naibbe cipher when there is a string of identical plaintext n-grams all in a row, and they are all encrypted the same way. Again, using the Naibbe cipher's default card-drawing procedure, this is probabilistically disfavored, but it's more likely to occur when it's a string of successive, identical unigrams. But the Naibbe cipher's general framework can accommodate these sorts of repetitive strings appearing through non-random scribal preference (which could happen as a time-saving shortcut; having hand-written text using this cipher, I definitely see the appeal of shortcuts). For example, within the Naibbe cipher, the additive version of the Roman numeral 4, IIII, could be written as qokedy qokedy qokedy qokedy. Similarly, the plaintext word "benevolentia" could be respaced as "b|en|ev|o|l|en|t|ia," and during encryption, the same bigram prefix could be recycled across all three "e_" bigrams (underlined).
(12-08-2025, 04:57 AM)anyasophira Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Does your system show that the same vords, glyphs and even bigrams like to cluster around line breaks? And places where the line ends?
Does your system start having certain bigrams trending more left or right (Like Patrick Feaster has demonstrated)
At present, the Naibbe cipher lacks mechanisms that reliably bias word/glyph/bigram placements within a line, page, or paragraph—other than the plaintext itself exhibiting those kinds of biases at the unigram and bigram level. This is a known limitation of the Naibbe cipher; see Section 4 in the paper.
One of the things I want to explore is the extent to which the structure of the plaintext can create these biases within Naibbe ciphertext. For example, if the Naibbe cipher were used to encrypt a poem such as Dante's Divina Commedia, the poem's line-by-line structure would have rhyming, repeated phrases, etc. that would theoretically impose greater line-by-line positional biases in the frequencies of plaintext unigrams and bigrams relative to prose such as Pliny's Natural History. Is that sufficient to explain the full extent of the VMS's "line as a functional unit" properties? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe it becomes much easier to achieve "line as a functional unit" properties within a Naibbe-like ciphertext if the plaintext is a poem or poem-like in its structure.
(12-08-2025, 04:57 AM)anyasophira Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Your tables- now
I know you did not focus on actual translation but rather showing something that mimics parts of the Voynich but you do shows charts of plain text letter ratios that match the voynich Glyphs so I am asking how much of your tables are just placeholders for any Latin letter in order to model this approach and how much of this is your actual best guess of what the suffixes, prefixes and Unigrams could actually be in plaintext Latin or Italian. For example did you somewhat choose to map Eva M to a Latin letters that are not as common or is it literally all arbitrary? Or does your cypher fix that? Like it doesn’t matter that certain glyphs and bigrams outnumber others?
Correct: I tried to design the cipher in such a way that it would reliably replicate the Voynichese glyph and glyph pair frequencies. But in this work, I didn't focus on an actual decryption/translation attempt because such an attempt would assume, among other things, that: (a) the Naibbe cipher or something very close to it is the literal VMS cipher; (b) that I have parsed Voynichese tokens correctly or mostly correctly into the affixes that correspond with plaintext letters; © that I have identified the correct plaintext language or close relatives of the plaintext language; and (d) that the tables I have constructed are at least partially correct in their letter assignments. An audacious set of assumptions!
I spent a lot of time manually fitting the tables' unigram word types to plaintext letters by performing Naibbe encryptions of Latin and Italian with placeholder codes (e.g., "unigram_alpha_a") and then comparing these placeholder words' proportional frequencies within the generated ciphertexts to the observed proportional frequencies of words within Voynich B. I did something similar with the prefixes and suffixes, but by comparison, I spent very little time optimizing them. That's because there's so many more of them, and the words they generate can be much rarer and are therefore much more subject to random noise / hypothetical scribal preference. Within this framework, optimizing the prefixes and suffixes essentially means assigning plaintext letters to them such that mock decryptions of Voynich B yield plaintext n-gram frequencies that optimally match those of a given plaintext language—aka a decryption attempt.
(12-08-2025, 04:57 AM)anyasophira Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anyways incredible work. Really interested how this continues as you fine tune it. I wish I head for math at times like this.
Thank you so much! -
RE: The Naibbe cipher
bi3mw > 13-08-2025, 05:50 AM
I ran your sample texts ( naibbe_Cleaned_52_01_10_word_lines.txt + naibbe_Cleaned_52_02_10_word_lines.txt - 25kb ) and the "original" Voynich text (ZL3a-n.txt) through a language-independent morphological parser. The distribution of the top 25 prefix/suffix pairs is quite simliar. Of course, we are not dealing with a natural language here, but at least the same material is being compared.
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RE: The Naibbe cipher
magnesium > 13-08-2025, 11:41 AM
(13-08-2025, 05:50 AM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I ran your sample texts ( naibbe_Cleaned_52_01_10_word_lines.txt + naibbe_Cleaned_52_02_10_word_lines.txt - 25kb ) and the "original" Voynich text (ZL3a-n.txt) through a language-independent morphological parser. The distribution of the top 25 prefix/suffix pairs is quite simliar. Of course, we are not dealing with a natural language here, but at least the same material is being compared.
Very interesting, thanks! Out of curiosity, would you mind running the same analysis on just the subsections of ZL3a-n.txt assigned to Voynich/Currier B? The overrepresentation of qok within the Naibbe cipher is meant to mimic Voynich B specifically, so I'm curious to see how well that holds up.