Character entropy of Voynichese

[Anton]

[...] the "anomalously low entropy" of Voynichese is something at least not consistently proven, [...]

I'm afraid that I don't understand what you mean exactly.

It is one of the easiest features of the MS that anyone trying to explain its meaning should ideally understand.

Characterizing something as "high" or "low", and "anomalously" in particular, implies comparison with something "commonly" "low" or "high", respectively. The procedure of comparison requires that the objects under consideration are comparable.

As I have been noting, character entropy is alphabet-dependent; next, direct comparison of entropy figures between languages with different alphabets is methodologically wrong - I guess, redundancy should be compared instead; next, comparison of the text dated no later than 15th century with texts in languages of 16th century and later is also methodologically wrong.

In these circumstances, I can not accept "low" Voynichese character entropy at face value. It might be "low" indeed, but someone should show that in a consistent way:

- checking how the entropy changes with most suggestive variations in Voynichese alphabet (e.g. considering ckh as one symbol instead of three or considering ir as one symbol instead of three, and so on);

- comparing redundancies rather than absolute entropies;

- making some comparisons (at least) to texts in medieval European languages.