How to recombine glyphs to increase character entropy?

[MarcoP]

Something I did not study in detail yet is what exactly the difference is between Voynich text without spaces and "normal" text without spaces. If you eliminate EVA-related issues like -iin, then removing spaces tackles a lot of your remaining problems.

This approach is only "legal" though if you assume that spaces were used in an artificial way that decreases entropy.

Hi Koen,
I am glad to see you continue this interesting line of investigation!

I made a simple experiment with two language texts (Italian=Machiavelli and Latin=Pliny) and two Voynch sections (Herbal A and Bio/Q13), each using two different transliterations (Currier and EVA). I may have made errors, so I think it would help if someone could double check.

_TEXT__ sp_c.h1 sp_b.h sp_cnd sp_cnd/h1 | nosp_c.h1 nosp_b.h nosp_cnd nosp_cnd/h1
_HA_Cur   3.787  6.319   2.531   0.668  |   3.911     6.607    2.696    0.689
Q13_Cur   3.725  5.735   2.010   0.540  |   3.752     5.862    2.109    0.562
_HA_EVA   3.790  5.980   2.190   0.578  |   3.815     6.063    2.248    0.589
Q13_EVA   3.805  5.672   1.867   0.491  |   3.805     5.740    1.936    0.509
machiav   3.935  7.034   3.098   0.787  |   3.982     7.298    3.316    0.833
_pliny_   4.013  7.379   3.367   0.839  |   4.003     7.506    3.504    0.875

The first four numbers in each row are for the original file, while the last four are for the no-space version.
cnd/h1 is the ratio between conditional entropy and character entropy: the measure you are referring to, I think.
Removing spaces always results in a considerable increase in entropy. In the case of Italian and Latin this could be due to two reasons:
1. there is a certain correlation between characters and spaces that results in frequent bigrams (e.g. Italian words often end with a vowel, Latin words often end with -s). By removing these frequent space-bigrams, you increase bigram entropy (b.h in the table).
2. removing spaces creates new bigrams that are very rare or absent in the original. For instance, 'ee' in Italian:
nuoveecomeebbeamicizieesoldati
nuove e come ebbe amicizie e soldati
This is again an increase in bigram entropy.

I believe that, if you go this way, using space-less language texts as a benchmark would make things "legal".