Can a new cipher help to explain the mysterious Voynich Manuscript?

"Created in the early 15th century, and often called the world's most mysterious manuscript, the Voynich Manuscript bears unusual illustrations and illegible writing in a unique script. When statistically analysed, "Voynichese"-as the script is known-reflects some characteristics of a typical language, but in other ways, behaves strangely. This has led experts to argue that its text could be an unknown or artificial language, gibberish, or a cipher."

""The Naibbe cipher is my attempt to find a way to encode something like Latin by hand as text that partially mimics the Voynich Manuscript's strange properties. The cipher works by randomly breaking a text into chunks that are one or two letters long. The cipher then disguises these chunks as Voynichese words, by encoding individual letters as groups of Voynichese glyphs through the use of six different substitution tables.""

""To reliably ensure that these tables are chosen in certain average proportions, the Naibbe cipher uses a draw from a deck of playing cards to determine which table encodes a given letter. When Greshko experimented with his new encipherment method-for example, encoding the start of Julius Caesar's De bello Gallico -he found that the resulting ciphertexts reproduced some of the Voynich Manuscript's unusual features.""

The Voynich Manuscript, created in the early 15th century, contains unusual illustrations and illegible writing in a unique script. "Voynichese" shows some characteristics of a typical language under statistical analysis but also displays peculiar behaviours that suggest an unknown or artificial language, gibberish, or a cipher. The Naibbe cipher encodes text by randomly breaking it into one- or two-letter chunks and mapping letters to groups of Voynichese-like glyphs using six substitution tables. A deck-of-cards draw selects substitution tables to enforce certain average proportions. Encoding examples, such as the start of De bello Gallico, reproduced several unusual Voynichese features.

Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events