Re: Entropy VS Word Length

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Brian Eric Farnell wrote:

> .....  My idea is this, the more predictable
> the sequence of letters, the less value each has as a data bit,
> therefore one would expect a highly predictable language to have
> a longer word length than an unpredictable one. 

There is indeed an odd contradiction in Voynichese here.
Words are relatively short, character sequences are rather predictable,
still the vocabulary size is quite normal. Voynichese is thus
more 'economical' than, say, Latin or English.
I tried to look into this problem in http://www.voynich.nu/wordent.html
but that addresses a few other things as well.

One possible solution to this apparent contradiction would be if,
indeed, Voynichese words are really only syllables or parts of words
(like in Arabic). A few questions to which I don't have the answers are:
how many different syllables are there in Latin or English. And how
does their number grow with increasing text size. Is there an agreed
manner of splitting Latin words into syllables?

The answers could be quite interesting. 
I had hoped to use one of the existing word processing packages to
split a text into syllables (by enabling hyphenation and setting a
rediculously
short line length) but this has not worked so far.

Cheers, Rene

PS: I just recovered from a complete mail and net wipe-out (no virus, 
fortunately). Antoine: could you resend me your E-mail address please?