[Article] Technical rebuttal: semantic density and the “Naibbe” verbosity constraint

[Torsten]

Yes. The extent of the treatment of the "toy model":

Thanks for posting that — it's more specific than the LinkedIn summary, and it makes the four devices easy to sort.

Two raise density and raise entropy. A sign valued as letter-or-digraph by position is a polyvalent sign: sometimes one glyph buys two letters, but a sign whose value varies by context is by definition less predictable from context, which is what higher h2 means. Same for compressing a frequent Latin sequence — abbreviation squeezes out redundancy, and redundancy is what keeps entropy low.

Two lower entropy and lower density. A null is a glyph carrying no plaintext, so it subtracts directly. The positional marker triggering a two-element swap is worse: a deterministic local transposition encodes nothing, it's length- and value-preserving, and it costs a marker glyph. That's a null with extra steps, and it's a net density loss. I'm not sure why it appears in a density argument at all.

Which leaves the letter demonstrating that some cipher can be denser than Naibbe — which nobody disputed — without showing that any such cipher matches the Voynich text, which is what the verbosity constraint was about.