Character entropy of Voynichese

[Anton]

You forget to mention Maori.

Did not calculate, but it must have a lower or same entropy as Hawaiian.
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Hi David,

It's probably not me who forgets to mention Maori, but Bennett   To be just to Bennett, however, he does not speak of Hawaiian exclusively, but mentions that "there actually are languages in some parts of the world" (that exhibit low character entropy values), and in the next sentence he makes use of the phrase "Polynesian languages" suggesting that they were not known to Bacon or other characters in the plot (in the times of publishing of this book the whole plot revolved around Dee and Bacon, and even D'Imperio's book was not yet published). From the footnote on p. 194 it just seems that Bennett had a handy opportunity of exploring Hawaiian in the person of one Thaddeus P. Dryja who tracked the Hawaiian references and prepared the ASCII coded tape of the source text for computation.

As I suggest above (and some clever men a while before me), it is, in the first place, not just the absolute values of entropies that needs be compared, but rather "differential" ones. And one finds that while h0-h1 of Voynichese is close to that of natural languages, its h1-h2 is way higher than natural languages (don't know how about Maori, but Hawaiian included).

My further thought - a trivial one - is that (as already expressed above), even within the same language the character entropy will be alphabet - dependent on how the alphabet is constructed. So what one needs is to check variations in Voynichese entropies with different approaches to constructing the Voynichese alphabet. Actually if one manages to "construct" a Voynichese alphabet such as that differential entropies would be close to that of the natural languages, that would be a huge step to decrypting Voynichese.

So one could start with checking Bennett's calculations. Bennett Jr was (he passed away in 2008) a renowned scientist, so he was clearly knowing what he is doing, and there's little probability that he made any direct mistakes, but even such things happen. Next one could explore the following paths:

• "modified" EVA - the same as EVA but with benched gallows considered as standalone composite characters;
  
• curve-line system - this needs to be modified to adopt all critique and developments made after Cham's article - considering apostrophes, horizontal crossbars etc.
  

Maybe I'll find time to do that myself, but I'm more than happy if that's done by anyone else, since the task is tedious