Word Entropy

[Anton]

(Values for entire TT with unclear "?" vords removed):


h0         h1         h2

12.97    10.45    4.36



When vords are randomly shuffled h2 increases:

12.97    10.45    4.52



There are enough repetitions of 2-vord patterns for this and, more generally, correlations between a vord and the next. But some reordering could still take place. For example, if every even-indexed vord is moved elsewhere (different line, different page) then for each repeated 3- or 4-vord pattern a repeated 2-vord pattern would remain.

OK, let's say that there would be no positive hints as to the shuffling. What's interesting is that when several years ago I did some screening for the regularities in narration structure in botanical folios based on keyword occurrences (Voynich stars), I failed to detect it, which suggested that vord shuffling might be in place. So it's of interest to approach the question of shuffling from different angles.

Another point of interest with h2 is that whether it could provide hints as to inflections. My idea is that different degrees of inflection would influence the word h2 (of course also h0 and h1) values. For example, in Russian you have six cases for nouns - nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative and prepositional. And, generally, word ending would be different. In Latin, if I'm not mistaken, you have only four. In English you have none, or even if they are distinguished, the word endings do not change, that's the point. Same thing for verbs. So it's of interest to see how different inflection behaviour of languages is (or is not) reflected in word entropy.