Interchangeable ch/sh and k/t characters

[Jorge_Stolfi]

That’s an interesting parallel and a great opportunity to remember how peculiar Voynichese is. First, character entropy tells us that Voynichese isn’t a phonetic rendering of a European language: we know that Voynichese glyphs do not behave like vowels and/or consonants in French, English, German, Latin, Greek, Italian etc.

Character entropy is totally dependent on the encoding of phonemes.  The character entropy of Italian would increase noticeably if one replaced "ch"->"k", "gn"->"ñ", "gl"->"ł', "sc"->"š", etc.  Even more if one replaced every open "e" by "ɛ", every open "o" by "ɔ", and marked every stressed vowel with a diacritic.

Likewise, the character entropy of Voynichese depends on what you count as a character.  It will be very low you consider each EVA letter as a character. It will be higher if you treat Ch, Cth etc. as single characters.  It will be even higher if you consider each "element" of my word model as a character -- in particular, if you count Che, She, ee, eee, CThe, CKhe, in, iin, iiin as single characters.

Word entropy is less dependent on the encoding.  But even that is affected by orthography, e.g. by word splitting and joining.  The word entropy of Italian would be lower if oblique pronouns were split from the verb ("ditemelo" -> "dite me lo") and compounds were split into components ("automoble" -> "auto mobile", "solamente" -> "sola mente", etc.  And it is lower also if the text is heavily abbreviated or in shorthand, so that many word types are merged ("pasto","pesto","posta" -> "pst" etc.)

Anyway, IIRC the word entropy of Voynichese was about 10 bits per word, which was well within the range of European languages.

Second, while in ordinary European languages it is possible that an initial character can be replaced with a different initial, this is much rarer than in Voynichese (where the phenomenon is systematic).

True.  But do you know what happens if you drop the "European"?

All the best, --stolfi