Interchangeable ch/sh and k/t characters

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Secondly, making such [digraph-for-letter] substitutions means it is no longer Italian.

Considering that the VMS script is original, any statistical comparisons with other languages must take into account that the "encoding" may not be a simple one-by-one substitution cipher of the official spelling.

Besides, when languages go through spelling reforms, people normally don't say that they became a different language.  Turkish changed its spelling radically from an Arabic-like script to a (remarkably phonetic) Roman-based one in the early 1900s; I don't think anyone would say that it is no longer Turkish.

Word entropy can barely be measured for the Voynich MS text. Word pair entropy is completely out of reach. For single-word entropy, the uncertainty of the alphabet, the handwriting itself and the word spacing makes that this cannot be estimated reliably.  As an example, one will get a highly variable number of hapax from the text, depending on which transliteration (of the same text) one uses.

But the numbers are interesting anyway:

• Count of word types, count of tokens, and word entropy (bits), considering only word types that occur at least M times:
  

  +---+------------------+------------------+------------------+
  | M |    Shennong (py) |  Voyn SPS (wp)   |  Voyn SPS (wc)   |
  +---+------------------+------------------+------------------+
  | 1 |  621 13266  7.53 | 3323  9892 10.08 | 2850 11205  9.56 |
  | 2 |  489 13134  7.46 |  923  7492  8.65 |  941  9296  8.49 |
  | 3 |  413 12982  7.38 |  567  6780  8.17 |  608  8630  8.10 |
  +---+------------------+------------------+------------------+

• Shennong = Shennong Bencao Jing in Mandarin pinyin, derived from files at the Chinese Text Projects  and Chinese Wikisource, with some bug fixes  ("in/2026-06-27-bencao-py.utf").
  
• Voyn SPS = Stared Parags section of VMS (f103r.1--f116r.30),  from a recent transcription by J.Stolfi, with all weirdos  mapped to '?', with commas ignored ("in/2026-06-29-starps-wp.ivp")  or treated as spaces ("in/2026-06-29-starps-wc.ivp").
  

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So my problem is that the word entropy of Voynichese seems to be too *high*.  Even considering all commas as spaces and excluding words that occur only once or twice.  I have several possible explanations, but that belongs to another thread.  Let me just say that, by my estimate, there are still about 3000 word breaks that were completely omitted either by the Scribe or by the transcriber [me].

Anyway, let me insist again that statistics (glyph and word frequencies, Zipfness, entropies, correlations etc) are not properties of languages, but of texts.  In any language one can have texts that have much lower or much higher word entropy than a typical novel or philosophical treatise.   

All the best, --stolfi