Scoring artefact for 45% entry collapse in i/e/a

[nablator]

Hi chrisj,

It doesn't work well because Voynichese and Italian are very different. You need other ciphering techniques (not the ones you think could work!) to have any chance of closing the gap between Voynichese and any European language.

Homophonic ciphers increase character conditional entropy (because of the unpredictability of the choice of alternate symbols that could be used for a given letter) and need more symbols than the alphabet. The same is usually true for abbreviations. This is not what Voynichese text looks like: it has a low character conditional entropy (the next character is too predictable) and a short list of common "characters" (symbols/glyphs), so you can try grouping some of them, like common word endings, to create a verbose substitution cipher. This could work in theory, maybe with a one-to-many mapping between plaintext letters and chunks of Voynichese text: the search space is huge but the analysis of VMS "languages" and "dialects" may help.

I would suggest reading some good papers like these by René Zandbergen to better understand these issues (the third one attempts to match the conditional entropy of Italian with a verbose substitution cipher):
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