Bigram = phoneme theory (language agnostic)

[ReneZ]

Surely only at the level of words? At the level of glyphs the entropy increases because [q] is so predictable.

One has to be careful. Removing q  removes information. But it also shortens the words. Thus, the average information per character may go up or down - it is not easy to predict. (Entropy is basically the average information per unit).

q is not really predictable. What is predictable is what comes after it. So, removing q makes the question: what comes after a space, a little bit more predictable = lower entropy.

What would really increase the entropy is to replace the pair qo by a new character. Then, all information is maintained, but the words are shortened, so average information per unit goes up.

I think these two different changes in entropy together would be interesting as word order is considered too variable yet glyph order too structured. (I thought that was one of the main paradoxes of the text.)

One can treat the word order and the glyph order inside words as two independent things. This can be shown by the following thought experiment.

Take a known, meaningful plain text. (Not too long.)
Sort all words according to decreasing frequency. This gives word list 1.

Now take a Voynich MS transcription and sort its words according to decreasing frequency. This gives word list 2.

Now make a dictionary which consists of pairing up word list 1 and word list 2 with each other.
Using this dictionary, one can "translate" the plain text to "Voynichese" on a word by word basis.

The resulting text has a "normal" word order and is meaningful. However, its glyph order follows the peculiar Voynich patterns.

(Of course, there are reasons to believe that this is not how the Voynich text was made. One of the main reasons are the peculiarities of line-initial words and line-initial characters, as you well know. But that's another story.)