23-01-2016, 02:08 PM
Comparatively low character entropy of Voynichese has traditionally been used as an argument against the natural language hypothesis. To make it clear, it is not the single argument against the natural language, but it seems to me that it is not the strongest one.
Why? Because I wonder how we can be sure of our calculation of Voynichese character entropy if we don't know the real Voynichese alphabet? We only work with transcriptions (such as EVA), which maybe (and I'm sure they are) not that adequate.
Take an English text and substitute all instances of "d" with "cl" (which visually is much the same, but not linguistically). In other words, exclude the letter "d" from the English alphabet and imagine that letters "c" and "l" now do all the work. I think that character entropy of English will then change (namely, decrease), will it not?
So if we decrease the level of decomposition in our transcriptions of Voynichese, entropy is likely to rise.
Why? Because I wonder how we can be sure of our calculation of Voynichese character entropy if we don't know the real Voynichese alphabet? We only work with transcriptions (such as EVA), which maybe (and I'm sure they are) not that adequate.
Take an English text and substitute all instances of "d" with "cl" (which visually is much the same, but not linguistically). In other words, exclude the letter "d" from the English alphabet and imagine that letters "c" and "l" now do all the work. I think that character entropy of English will then change (namely, decrease), will it not?
So if we decrease the level of decomposition in our transcriptions of Voynichese, entropy is likely to rise.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)