[Article] The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript (Bowern et al. 2020)

[Koen G]

Hi Claire, thank you for answering questions about your paper here. I am looking forward to reading your oncoming paper as well.

About character entropy, I wonder if you considered verbose ciphers? Quite a few current researchers consider this to be a possibility. The idea would be that a group of Voynichese characters, like [aiin], would represent one source text character. It is in a way the opposite of abbreviation and is in my opinion much more promising.

I demonstrated recently (with a lot of help from Marco) that treating Voynichese like a verbose cipher can raise character entropy values to the very edge of normality:
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The major issue with a verbose cipher hypothesis is that it makes words very short. For example if [aiin] is one character in the source text, then [daiin] is now only two characters. This implies that the source text would be something like a syllabic language or another language with words split, in syllables or otherwise.