From "decryption" to "translation"

[ReneZ]

It wasn't really meant as a riddle. Also, the second example is 'closer' in a way, since the inverse of the operation also allows compression of real Voynichese.

However, this is *not* how the real MS text was generated. At best it could give a hint into the direction.

The reduction in entropy with respect to the Italian text is the result of a verbose substitution.
The word patterns arise by chopping up the original text in syllables (sort of), in combination with the verbose substitution. A syllable in this case is defined by :
- a consonant cluster followed by a vowel cluster
I chose Italian because very many words end in a vowel, so the above definition of syllables largely (but not completely) keeps word boundaries intact.

The conditional entropy of the compressed Voynich text goes up to a staggering 3.1
The problem is with the single character entropy, which is 'only' 3.7.
It is not just the value that is still too low. It is the frequency distribution as a whole that is wrong, and this is not easy to fix.