Is the VM written in Landa Khojki script?

[MarcoP]

The scripts proposed by Sukhwant Singh appear not to represent (most) vowels: they are either abjads or abugidas (or something intermediate between the two). This is also how he reads the VMS: each symbol corresponds to a syllable (consonant+vowel).

   

Detail from 34:49

Unless I am misunderstanding something, this is a problem. Scripts of that kind result in increased character entropy, since entropy is lowered by the fact that consonants and vowels tend to alternate, while typically there are no phonetic constraints between consecutive syllables. As You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. discussing Latin abbreviations, the low entropy values for the VMS suggest that the script should be "compressed" to reproduce the phonetics of Indo-European languages: quite the opposite of what Sukhwant Singh does.

The main point is a general statistical one, from information theory. Compression of a string of characters means an increase in entropy, while the inverted process (de-compression of the compressed file) a decrease in entropy. Thus, a process converting a plain text with higher entropy to the Voynich MS text is equivalent with some kind of expansion. Now, replacing Voynich MS characters with further expansion will not increase the entropy, but rather reduce it. Because of what has just been described here, the Voynich MS text has occasionally been called (or compared with) a verbose cipher.

Latin and other European languages do not work because (among other reasons) their entropy is too high with respect to the VMS: assuming a script like Landa-Khojki makes things even worse.

EDIT: The observation that abjads have slightly higher character conditional entropy than alphabetic scripts is discussed in Lindemann and Bowern "Character Entropy in Modern and Historical Texts".