Have we ruled out simple substitution unwisely?

[eggyk]

Just to remind people that the anomalously low entropy was discovered in 1976, and Eva was first introduced in 1999. 

For the impact of the transliteration language on entropy, see Figure 12 (with surrounding text) on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

I don't mean to specifically criticise any transliteration alphabet or to blame EVA specifically, to be clear. I think that the work done there has incredibly useful and valuable and I appreciate all of it. 

But hypothetically speaking, what if each of those transliteration alphabets share some underlying aspect that causes the issue? These results would then due to a systematic error instead of the VMS itself. It would be good to rule this out as far as possible. 

For those who think character entropy issues are not inherent to Voynichese, I can only encourage you to experiment with this yourself. That's the best way to get a feel for the problem.

It's quite possibly (or probably) the case that there is an inherent entropy problem in the text. If there are changes that can be made to our transliterations, however, that bring things closer to natural languages as a starting point that could have implications in VMS research.

Honestly, even work that concludes in "I tried lots of new changes to transliteration and the entropy problem still didn't go away" is useful science, i think.