Word Entropy

[Koen G]

Thanks, Marco! I agree that the results in English are too hard to read. I think with abbreviations, you need to keep more consonants for it to work. Unless the abbreviations are frequent enough to be understood by the individual.

One example, closer to a practical explanation, is the way students will abbreviate common words after a while when taking notes. For example at university in some courses, I often had to write the word "maatschappij" (society) which I just abbreviated to "mij" with a line instead of dots. Now, since I was lazy taking notes, I often ended up photocopying girls' notes before an exam. They also used their own abbreviations, which would be impossible to expand in isolation. But I had no problem with them, because I actually knew the context and the expected vocabulary.

It is like Helmut suggested that [daiin] could be "d'aui" for "according to Avicenna".

Assuming an extreme case of such abbreviations would allow the text to remain useful for those who know the context and vocabulary. If the abbreviation are chosen in a way that they reduce the lexicon, this might "fix" word entropy. This would be what you did in the first experiment, right?

But, as you say, this is more likely to increase character entropy than to reduce it, which is our issue with so many tests. 

I'm not sure if this is correct, but right now I feel like character entropy is the more fundamental problem. Most operations on the level of the lexicon (like turning certain words into homographs, omitting words, randomly duplicating words and creating duplication patterns) should hardly impact character entropy. 

Conversely, doing something like ordering words' letters alphabetically would reduce character entropy and affect word entropy as well. (Although if something was done that involves shuffling letters, our efforts of decoding it are certainly doomed).