Re: low entropy text

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Dennis:] Twenty characters sounds low for a Romance language. 
    
Well, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese don't use "k", "y", "w" (except
for foreign names and derivatives), so the "official" alphabet has
only 23 letters. Moreover, Italian hardly ever uses "x" and "j",
uses "q" only in historical spellings, and is quite stingy on 
diacritics.

So a 20-letter "effective" alphabet for Rhaeto-Romance (whose spelling
is based on the Italian one) is not so out of range. (Assuming, of
course, that space and punctuation is not counted.)

    > Could it be due to a lossy spelling?
    
For Italian, it is partly a case of lossy spelling (no indication of
stress; no distinction between "open" and "closed" vowels, as in
"bello/nero", "sotto/notte"); and partly the use of digraphs for some
phonemes ("sci" for "sh", "gi" for "j", etc.).

All the best,

--stolfi

PS. I am going to be in Bristol, England for a conference next week,
and probably sightseeing in London and environs on friday-sunday. It
would be a pleasure to meet any British Voynichologists over lunch or
something.  (I plan to read my e-mail regularly during the conference.)

F'rinstance, it would be a chance to start paying that pizza bet,
which I am now afraid that I will eventually lose...