Bigram = phoneme theory (language agnostic)

[ReneZ]

I really like the statement of @nablator:

... I have a nagging feeling that we are missing something very obvious and very artificial in the way Voynichese is constructed.

This is because it coincides exactly with my own nagging feeling.
It one wants to solve a cipher, one should attack it at its weakest point, which is where it is showing the clearest signatures (i.e. in the statistics).
The Voynich text is not necessarily 'just' a cipher, but the same rule should be applied.

While the anomalous conditional entropy is long known, this is just a single number. What is more important is that this number reflects a completely different distribution of bigrams.

Regardless whether one wants to approach the problem by finding a method to convert Voynich text back to plain text, or the other way around, to find a way to convert a normal plain text to Voynichese, this is one of the most fundamental problems to resolve. (It is not the only one!!).

Clearly, attempts to just find a translation table for characters and a matching language can only fail, if this goes nowhere to explain the fundamental differences in the bigram statistics.

I also very much like a recent statement of @davidsch (in another thread) which was along the lines: "presenting lots of complicated graphics won't help". This is very true, as shown by all the repeated attempts to do the same thing over again. However, those very few who take the time to take a closer look have a much greater chance of not failing in the same way.

Find the weakest spot and find a way to explain in.
Bennett put the first quantitative information about this forward in the seventies. Ever since that time, I have not seen any reasonably successful explanation of 'what could have caused it',  apart from the generic proposal of a 'verbose cipher'.