Some letters aren't letters

[Emma May Smith]

For one, there are several underlying assumptions.
One is, that the text has to be read from left to right. This actually makes essentially no difference. (And as a matter of fact, entropy is independent of the reading direction).
Another is, that the word spaces are real. This is a more complicated question, but if one were to assume that the word spaces are not real, one runs into many other problems.

I did not think that either of these were assumptions. Although we could be wrong, there is evidence that both of these are true: the text runs left to right and spaces are real.
(I actually no longer believe that spaces are as real as we would consider them today. They may separate morphemes but not whole words. That is, grammatical words may span two or more textual words, with the spaces representing a meaningful break to the writer, such as morpheme boundaries. The spaces are thus still important.)