Cvetka's Slovenian Theory Thread

[bt2901]

No, definitely not. There may be some difference in conditional entropy, between highly inflected languages and less inflected langauages, but these differences are not significicant, and the conditional entropy of the Voynich MS text is way lower than that.

If the conditional entropy is low when the letter O can be predicted to follow P (like in Slovenian prefix used to form perfective verbs), or in -suffixes  -dam, or dy, transcribing them only as such eliminates other possible biglyphs and increases rigidity.

I think one way to check if would be to take something like Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or whatever text you prefer) and artificially replace all prefixes by "po" and all verb endings with "-am" (i.e., conjugate all verbs to be in a 1st person present singular). Something like this:

Vsi ljudje se rodijo svobodni in imajo enako dostojanstvo in enake pravice. Obdarjeni so z razumom in vestjo in bi morali ravnati drug z drugim kakor bratje.

Vsi ljudje se porodim svobodni in poimam enako postojanstvo in enake pravice. Podarjeni so z poumom in povestjo in bi moram ravnam drug z drugim kakor bratje.

I think the overall consensus here is that even this degree of mangling won't be enough to decrease h2 down to Voynich levels (recall that h2 measures not just regularities in prefixes/endings, but also regularities in the roots, which are more "random" in Slavic languages), but it would be interesting to actually check.