Lingua Volgare Shorthand

[ginocaspari]

The truth is that an alphabet like Eva, which indeed is well known to split up things that are probably units, does indeed further lower conditional entropy, but in all known alphabets this entropy is anomalously low.

I agree. The most obvious EVA splits are the benches. Second perhaps [i]-clusters. But unsplitting those still won't get your h2 up to 2.5. (Conditional character entropy of around 3 would be at the lower end for regular texts).

The notion that EVA probably splits too much is not new, and it wasn't new when I wrote this post: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

There, I took merging common glyph pairs to the extreme, and the resulting entropy is still not satisfactory. Not to mention the reduction to word length etc.

Dear Koen Gheuens,
yes - we are arguing very much in your favour. Because something is not new does not necessarily mean it is incorrect. As elaborated above, we hypothesize the "missing entropy" to be due to the shorthand especially when it concerns word endings. Please take a look at chapter (6) here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where we elaborate on the individual bigrams and you will see in the table that a vast majority of them are affected. Possibly even more than you mention in your post as we believe that the upwards stroke at the beginning of MO, NO, N, and M are frequently misread as an individual A. We do not expect a shorthand to display the same characteristics as the base language in terms of h2 and a reduced word lenght is absolutely not a problem for a shorthand. In fact, that's the goal.

It's also worth to note that Claire Bowern calculates an increase of entropy via the inclusion of abbreviations in a normal text - I am mentioning this because this will likely follow as the next counter argument. The key point here is "inclusion in a normal text". We assume here that we are dealing with a shorthand that reduces most words. We do not think we face a normal text with occasional common abbreviations.