(16-09-2020, 07:56 AM)farmerjohn wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As for merging Voynich letters I think it's just trial and error method. One merging pair can produce somewhat predictable result, but the combination of merges is highly volatile. Not speaking about the logic: why qok and qot are being merged, but qop and qof are not?
Yeah it's not completely logical as a supposed encryption system. But I selected frequency as a primary guiding principle, and with a good reason. Anyone who has played around with manipulating entropy will know that for a change to have a decent effect, it needs to affect a decent number of cases. Merging a rare combination of glyphs might in theory be sensible, but it won't show up in your entropy values for the whole text.
So therefore, I focused on the big boys, and used trial and error. But the results aren't entirely random: why does [e] want to remain untouched? [ee, ey, eo, ed] were all part of the top 20, but merging them did not have the desired effects.