Spaces and Entropy

[Koen G]

Did you ever come to a conclusion why the Voynich increase in h2 is bigger than most texts? Or could it simply be that the effect would be larger for texts with a small starting h2?

I think so. It's not an absolute rule, but the general tendency in the corups is that Latin text have little to gain by removing spaces (both in absolute terms and as a percentage). A language like Italian sits somewhere in between, and languages like German and English gain a lot. 

Imagine a text where conditional entropy has been maximized by shuffling everything, including spaces. In this text, removing spaces will have a small effect on h2. The VM almost sits at the other end. Some very predictable pairs are removed if you take out spaces. Granted, these will be replaced by other predictable pairs in places where common final and common initial glyphs meet. But there will be more variation overall.

Note that in unmodified EVA, Voynichese's gains were just a bit above the mean. I think this is because of the aforementioned scenario, where omitting spaces creates novel common pairs, like [nc, nq, ns]... These in turn will keep h2 low

In fact, if we look at the absolute increase in h2 (rather than a percentage), EVA's gains are below the mean.