26-01-2016, 08:17 AM
Some comparisons of entropy statistics can be found here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(written by Dennis Stallings). I have a bit of an additional explanation of Bennett's work, with a reference to Dennis' paper here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The example given above, with the question whether 'iin' should count as 1 letter or as 3 is covered by this.
In Bennett's alphabet this is one single character. In Currier's alphabet, all possible combinations of strings of i's followed by something are a single character, and this is part of the reason why he has 36 characters, i.e. more than most alphabets. Statistics using Currier's alphabet were also computed by Dennis. One cannot compress much more than that. (Note that Currier also represents all composite gallows like ckh as a single character).
The entropy analysis does not exclude that the text is meaningful or language-like. It does exclude that the text was obtained by a simple substitution of one of the common languages written in an alphabetic script.
"Common language" is a bit vague of course.
If there is a plain text, in Latin, Greek, English, or one of the Romance or Germanic languages, then "something else" has been done to it before it became the text we see. I'm not aware of detailed entropy analyses of Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, etc. but these are not expected to have a particularly low second order entropy either. Specifically languages where vowels are not always written should be expected to have a somewhat higher second order entropy (there are more consonants than vowels to make pairs with).
The example of Japanese or other Asian languages is a different story. Here, not much can be said yet. There have been some experiments with different renditions of Chinese, but I don't believe that these are conclusive.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(written by Dennis Stallings). I have a bit of an additional explanation of Bennett's work, with a reference to Dennis' paper here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The example given above, with the question whether 'iin' should count as 1 letter or as 3 is covered by this.
In Bennett's alphabet this is one single character. In Currier's alphabet, all possible combinations of strings of i's followed by something are a single character, and this is part of the reason why he has 36 characters, i.e. more than most alphabets. Statistics using Currier's alphabet were also computed by Dennis. One cannot compress much more than that. (Note that Currier also represents all composite gallows like ckh as a single character).
The entropy analysis does not exclude that the text is meaningful or language-like. It does exclude that the text was obtained by a simple substitution of one of the common languages written in an alphabetic script.
"Common language" is a bit vague of course.
If there is a plain text, in Latin, Greek, English, or one of the Romance or Germanic languages, then "something else" has been done to it before it became the text we see. I'm not aware of detailed entropy analyses of Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, etc. but these are not expected to have a particularly low second order entropy either. Specifically languages where vowels are not always written should be expected to have a somewhat higher second order entropy (there are more consonants than vowels to make pairs with).
The example of Japanese or other Asian languages is a different story. Here, not much can be said yet. There have been some experiments with different renditions of Chinese, but I don't believe that these are conclusive.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)