How multi-character substitution might explain the voynich’s strange entropy

[kckluge]

But I also agree with @Jorge_Stolfi here: n-grams entropies do not necessarily mean much because they are heavily dependent on the transcription. Word entropies are more reliable (they only depend on 'space' being actually a 'space', and on differently written words being actually different words).

I don't agree with Stolfi's dismissal of letter-based statistics. We don't know if Voynichese is a phonetic representation at all. Whatever it is, is very much dependent on its writing system. So to get a clue about what's going on, we must compare different ways of transliterating Voynichese to different writing systems. Including codes and ciphers, which are essentially also writing systems.

What I do vehemently agree with is that people must be more aware that Voynichese =/= EVA. When running letter-based tests, there must always be awareness of the choices made and their effects.

I second Koen's vehement agreement that people must be more aware that Voynichese =/= EVA, and also don't agree (probably more vehemently than he does) with Stolfi's dismissal of letter-based statistics. While there is room for disagreement on questions like how many characters do ligatured gallows represent and in what order (compare Bennett & Currier's transcription schemes), etc. it is fundamentally unproductive to pretend we can just ignore the text as anything other than bags of strokes separated by spaces. 

It also (IMNSHO) constitutes an unreasonable level of agnosticism regarding how ink strokes on the vellum group together into morphologically equivalent glyph forms. I think it's fair to say that few people question (for instance) whether EVA 'a', 'o', 'l', 'd', and 'y' are, in fact, discrete, identifiable glyph forms in the text -- although, to be fair, we have (for instance) seen folk suggest that it matters whether an 'a' is closed at the top or not, and there are at least three distinct variants of 'l' (often on the same page) involving how the loop is closed at the top. And anyone who believes that those variations matter is both welcome and encouraged to transcribe a few pages and see how making those assumptions changes various letter-level stats....

The solution isn't to throw one's hands up in despair and pretend that glyph level statistics are useless, it's to calculate the statistics over different options (how are ligatured gallows handled, how are word-final i*<x> combinations handled, etc.) and see how sensitive the values of the statistics are to those choices.