(17-11-2025, 12:10 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the case of Voynichese, the entropy per character depends on whether one counts each EVA character as a separate letter, or if one considers each of Ch, Sh, ee, iin, etc to be a single letter.
And one must look at higher-order entropy, at least order 3 or 4 for characters.
High orders need huge samples to converge but comparisons can be done on samples of the same size. I can use big text samples for order 3: I'm not sure if this has been done recently. Probably last time was ~30 years ago and the only available program (running on DOS) had a severe size limitation IIRC.
To measure how wasteful Voynichese is, EVA is not ideal, the situation is actually worse: Froggy may be the best rendition in terms of space, since gallows use about as much horizontal space as ee.
ch and Sh are usually larger than ee, so using 2 characters for them is not perfectly representative of their footprint.