Spaces and Entropy

[Bernd]

Generally speaking, abbreviation symbols will take a text's entropy statistics further away from the VM, so this is not something I am concerned about. 

One thing I can try is take a normalized Latin text and introduce abbreviation symbols by replacing certain letter groups with numerals.

1 = con, com, cun, cum
2 = tur, ur
3 = us, os
4 = ris, tis, cis

Doing this will remove some information from the text, because when we now see "4", we must guess from context whether it represents ris, cis or tis. Therefore, we could hypothesize that some entropy stat will be reduced. However, they are all increased. 

h0: 4.64 -> 4.86
h1: 4.01 -> 4.15
h2: 3.31 -> 3.38

It was to be expected that h1 would increase, since we introduce several new, frequent symbols. 
H2 increases as well, probably in part because the non-abbreviated parts of the Latin text still behave like normal. Moreover, abbreviation condenses the text, which is also likely to increase h2.

Thank you, that's to be expected.
Finding strong arguments against VM characters acting as latin abbreviations ist also important, since several symbols look like such and are placed accordingly.

To sum it up - we have a ciphertext with low h1 and extremely low h2 that stands out from contemporary manuscripts, yet spaces seem to behave similarly to ordinary texts. That's why I like the roman numeral hypothesis, though it probably is not that simple.

I expect the VM plaintext, if it exists, to either be highly verbose or not ordinary text at all.