reading [y] as a null character

[geoffreycaveney]

Nulls are often mentioned when it comes to possibilities we can expect, so it is on my "to check" list. However, the verbose cipher thing took me so long that I moved on to imagery for a while. 
What I was planning was to check what would happen for each glyph if it was treated as a null. And combinations of glyphs, like what if [a, o and y] are all nulls? I don't understand why [y] should be a special case though. Take [a] for example; instead of merging it with each possible combination of following glyphs, it may be simpler to just omit it.

Your [o+glyph] bigrams worked so well on the h2 conditional entropy of the text that it's hard to believe the results could be as good or better if [o] were treated as a null instead. And you also achieved your best results with many n-grams including [a] as well. If you just omit [a], you are losing for example the distinction between [al] and [l], and between [ar] and [r]. With [y] on the other hand I don't recall any n-grams with [y] that ended up in your best results to improve the entropy statistics. And there is also the linguistic argument that the ubiquitous vord-final [y] excessively reduces the number of possible word-final or syllable-final letters/phonemes. Treating [y] as a null really opens up many more actual meaningful vord-final letters representing actual phonemes. I think it makes it much easier to relate to actual natural languages and texts.