Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

the lack of a good fit for all folia can suggest there may not be a hard/mechanical procedure behind Voynichese, that was strictly followed to either encrypt, transliterate or produce gibberish.

And indeed I believe there was no such "hard/mechanical procedure".  The constraints are just those of whatever natural language it was written in.

I meant the 1st order conditional entropy of a vord given the previous one: H(vord | previous_vord), not the entropy of the vord itself,  H(vord).

Ah! Did someone compute that statistic?  I don't recall seeing it.

Rene only reports the 0-order word entropy (indeed about 10 bits/word).  But, as he cautions, this number may be inflated by a large incidence of "spelling errors" (variant spellings of the same word), which is hinted to by the large number of single-use words.

I'm not sure H(next_glyph | previous_glyph) necessarily correlates with H(vord | previous_vord)

indeed it should not.

given that the VMS seems to originate around the Alpian region

Whoa, I would not give you that.  

All the evidence that has been produced to support that claim proves only that the physical manuscript was put to vellum in Europe, by an European Scribe who also drew the illustrations, copying many details from manuscripts that were popular among educated Europeans at the time.  

That evidence does not even indicate that the Author (the person(s) who decided to create the book, designed the script, composed the contents, and recruited the Scribe) was European.  

He was in Europe when the scribing onto vellum took place, and that makes it a bit more likely that he was European.  On the other hand, we have the fact that the only writing in European script that seems original -- the month names -- does not quite match any European language checked so far.  That pushes the probability back towards he not being European...

just like the Jesuits did centuries later with many of the indigenuous languages in South America.

The scripts developed by the Jesuits were developed for the purpose of teaching the languages to priests.  Some of the scripts that were developed by Western missionaries for use by the natives, like the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., used totally invented characters.  Someone recently mentioned Mexican prayer books created in Mexico in the 1500s, that used ideographic symbols.

All the best, --stolfi