Character entropy of Voynichese

[Torsten]

Only very few people are fully aware of the implications of the statistics, of which the entropy is only one, but an important one.

It is exactly because of this that, for the last decades, people have been trying to translate the text by simple substitution (or something very similar), and come up with meaningless text.

This will probably keep going on.

Hello Rene, 

How can you decide if someone is fully aware of the implications of the statistics without knowing the solution?

I would say that people try to solve the VMS because it is there and not because of weird statistics. In the past the most common mistake in deciphering undeciphered scripts was to guess the system behind the script. Many people think that it is only necessary to find the meaning for each glyph to read an unknown script. But to understand a text in an unknown script in an unknown language you have to reconstruct both the meaning for each glyph and the language used. In my eyes the same is true for the VMS. 

What did we know about the system behind the text of the VMS? What did we know about the language of the VMS? One fact is that sequences of glyphs repeat in vertical and horizontal direction (gallow glyphs, line initial and line final letters, ...). What else did we know?