The Voynich Ninja

As you may or may not know, the character entropy of Voynichese is extremely low. This is caused by a number of phenomena, not in the least by the fact that characters appear in predictable places. For example in EVA if you have [i], it is likely followed by [i] or [n] and preceded by [i] or [a].

Rene posted the following in Marco's thread today:

Quote:- how to recombine glyphs in order to increase entropy? I did some very initial experiments with this that were quite promising, but the number of possible permutations is a big problem here.

This is something I have been exploring as well last year:
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An intuitive example is the following: [aiin] is a unit so common in EVA, where it is written as a series of characters. This might unnecessarily inflate character entropy, so what if we replace [aiin] by a single character?

(Note: I take a humble stance when it comes to statistics and will be happily corrected by those more skilled in the subject.)

What I learned was the following:

• I preferred to use the value h2/h1 because this gives the text's realized h2 as a percentage of its highest possible h2. So very much simplified a text with for example (h2/h1=0.5) reaches 50% of its maximal h2. You cannot compare h2 outright because h1 has to be taken into account as well (at least, this is what I took from Anton's teachings, and it seemed to work out in practice as well).
  
• My strategy was basically to introduce new characters to replace common letter groups. This did raise h2, but h1 as well since I was inflating the alphabet
  
• Cumulative changes interact in an unpredictable way. The first couple of changes you make might actually reinforce each other, with all changes combined resulting in a greater h2/h1 increase than the sum of their separate effects. After a while, however, the inflated alphabet takes its toll and I was unable to further raise h2/h1. So in the beginning you might get great results but after a few changes there are already diminishing returns, until you reach a critical point where little to no increase is possible.
  

These were my findings about replacing glyph groups by new characters:
- Replacing [qo] by something else has little effect. I think this is because the new character is still extremely positionally dependent (it always follows space).
- I was unable to do anything useful with [ee] either.
- Replacing clusters like [aiin], [aiir]... has the highest effect I've found. I-clusters in vanilla EVA transcriptions are a huge burden on character entropy.
- Collapsing benches into one new character each has a great effect. Collapsing benched gallows does not, but combined with collapsing normal benches, the effect is great.
- Collapsing the bigrams [ar, or, al, ol, am] (one of Nick's suggestions) has a decent effect as well.




Combining the three most effective measures, I was able to raise h2/h1 to a barely acceptable level. However, h2 alone was still much too low.

Removing spaces has an extremely beneficial effect, but I felt uncertain about how "legal" this step was. It is a change of a different order than combining some of EVA's strokes.

Since writing this post I have not had any better ideas... So Rene I wonder what your own experience is and if other members might have ideas.