Character entropy of Voynichese

[Sam G]

Even leaving aside the fact that the "anomalously low entropy" of Voynichese is something at least not consistently proven, from the viewpoint of  formal logic the entropy's value, be it high or low, says nothing about whether the text is enciphered or not.

Just because a message in a language which has low entropy may have been enciphered.

Well, it can't be a ciphertext of any language which has a higher entropy than the VMS text (which rules out all European languages and many others), and it places very strong constraints on ciphers that could have been used on low entropy languages.

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Really, there is no way of escaping the conclusion that the low entropy is simply an intrinsic part of the content, not the result of some "cipher mechanism".  The most likely explanation for that is that the VMS is written in a language which has low entropy, i.e. that has a relatively rigid phonotactic structure.  From that point of view, there is nothing "anomalously low" about the entropy at all, since there exist languages with lower entropy, i.e. with a more rigid phonotactic structure than we find in the VMS text.

The weak word order can only mean that the words are not ordered by a grammar as we know for natural languages. Therefore you would have to assume a language without grammar.

I've responded to this point of yours before:

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I suspect that there are rules we are not aware of governing word order in the VMS, so that (for example) in some cases we might see a pair of words A B, but in a different context we will see same the pair B A.  German, for instance, has some rules like this that we don't have in English, but it would be incorrect to say that German has "weak word order".  So the "weak word order" in the VMS might also be only apparent.  The problem is that we don't know what the rules are.

I think the "writing style" of the VMS also probably plays a role here.  Many people tacitly assume that a prose style similar to that which we use to write English must be employed in the VMS, but this isn't the only possibility.  The writing style is probably "weird", too.  This affects a number of considerations about word order, repetitiveness, lack of repeated long phrases, etc.