The Voynich Ninja

First, I would like to apologies for my first post, because I said there that I had a theory. When I meant to say I a hypothesis(I always seem to get those two mixed up), which is that each glyph or glyphs represent a specific # of Chinese characters.

1.  I thought it was just 昴 which is Subaru (yes, I thought it was Japanese at first, there is another hypothesis before this one.) Then I ask the question: " what do the Chinese called Pleiades?" So I look up Chinese constellation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and  it was the same character, but there was also this one 宿 next to 昴 on this star map. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I then went to see if 昴宿 fit into EVA: oalcheol and begun to notice that oal has a slight gap between it and cheol. Also saw that EVA: eo conjoin together and look similar to the part in green and that EVA: ch appear similar to the roof part in red (picture below #1-3). You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This where my hypothesis started and I went on to learn the Chinese language to see if I can found more character in VMS.

2. I was looking for the radical character "辶" in blue to found out its meaning, (testing to see if EVA: iin might match it) and found that in Chinese it means "to walk"  Japanese its "water" "slide" or "water slide." When saw water/slide, I immediately went to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the vord I saw was  EVA: kooiin. So I went to google translate ( I admit a bad source to use, but unfortunately I don't know Chinese very well, yet.) and type in water lilies(English --> Chinese(traditional)). I got 睡蓮, the first character didn't match anything, so I switch the language around(Chinese(traditional)-->English) and got rid of 睡 to see what 蓮mean. This is how I got lotus for 蓮 (I also got lotus/water lily, when looking it up on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..) So I notice EVA: k look like the top part, while the blue part I said was iin. Now am left with EVA: oo and this symbol 車. At this point I thought my hypothesis was wrong, but I realize the character was very complex to be represent by a few glyphs. This may be for reason #1 why they use the EVA: oo, but then I found reason #2. I went to look up what 車 mean and turn out to be "vehicle" and then it hit me that the author made his/her own logography to represent vehicle. While 車 is a top down view of a cart, the EVA: oo is a side view of the cart wheels, and why they use the two O.

3. I found this one by accident, while looking at lotus in google translate I found this character 菏. Which look surprisingly like the first vord on paragraph 2 in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It was odd to me why the first vord on both paragraph would be lotus, but then I copy the character and look on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. On there it says "name of a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.", but I wan't convenience. So I went to google map and look around all in Shandong province in China for this river and while I was looking, I realize that their is a lot river with "he" at the end, which is the sound  菏-->Hé makes. Then it click, I went to google translate and in my head ask "google, what is river in Chinese?"(type river into box) Google responds:菏. (well thanks google for sending me on a wild goose chase.)

Now my final image "Possible match" are possible explanation for certain weird character for each vords.
The * is a responds to...

(21-09-2019, 12:14 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.why so many words end in 'y'  i personally would love to hear it.

This character "了" could be why the EVA: y end every vords or the two below it. Though I can't explain what the EVA: dy, because d has been eluding so far. I will also show this video to show possible connecton between EVA: y and 了. Alright, commence trial by fire.

I need to make a correction, this is not river 菏. This is 河. (which might be EVA: chor). The other one is name of a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) but which river it may be referring, I don't know.

Hi Patrick, and welcome to the forum! (From one noob to another   )

This theory is interesting but not for the reason I thought when I first read the title.

First of all, it's always a cool surprise to meet another Chinese as a second language learner. How much of the language have you learned so far? Are you learning just the spoken language, or the written language also? Traditional or simplified characters (jiântî zì)?

I just wanted to mention a few things to forum users here who know nothing about Chinese. The writing system has a lot in common with the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Mayan writing systems in their respective heydays, in that it's a mixed ideographic and phonographic writing system. There are thousands of characters. A couple hundred are pure logographic pictures, but most of the rest are made of two or more of these pictograms, simplified and smushed together, called "radicals". At least one radical hints at the meaning, and at least one hints at the pronunciation. Each character has one pronunciation in any given Chinese language at any given time, but its meaning remains roughly the same across time and communities. Prior to the adoption of universal Mandarin education under Communism, China had a linguistic situation a lot like the Arabic-speaking world. Two literate people from different places could write to each other with no trouble, and probably make themselves understood in speech if they both spoke an affectedly high register or simplified pidgin. But the two of them would absolutely not understand each other if they each spoke their native dialect.

I'm not a native Chinese speaker, and it's been ten years since I used the language on a daily basis. But I do feel qualified to offer you some feedback:

* There aren't nearly enough Voynichese two- or three-character combinations to account for all the common radicals and simple pictogram characters you'd need to write even a simple Chinese text.
* You didn't give many examples of correspondences between Chinese characters (and their component radicals) and Voynichese vords (and their component 2~3 character parts), so I can't assess for consistency, but the few examples you give feel shoehorned to me, based on chance resemblance to the strokes drawn. If you have a system by which each vord can be consistently mapped to one Chinese character, and the resulting text makes some sense in some written Chinese language, I'd be happy to help you with the decoding.
* Your theory implies that Voynichese could represent a novel script for rendering Chinese characters, or that the VMS could represent a badly distorted copy of a Chinese text copied by a scribe with no familiarity at all with Chinese. The thing is, I've seen examples of heathen attempts to imitate real Chinese characters, and they don't typically look anything like the VMS. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the righthand part of the second picture down.
* The Chinese Academy of Sciences had a team of academics study the VMS. They saw absolutely nothing Chinese about it, and were as baffled by it as anyone else who's seen it.

That said...

* The idea that the vords could be written symbols of logically categorized concepts directly (as opposed to written symbols of human vocalizations that are in turn symbols of concepts) is a great one that is worth further exploration. This is compatible with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., who found that certain low-frequency words tend to cluster by page and by section. It's possible that the VMS was a teacher's book of lecture notes, written in an unpronounceable idea-based shorthand that he invented himself, and made perfect sense to him. Keep in mind that this is a fundamentally different kind of symbolic language from Chinese or any of the other great naturally evolved logographic writing systems.
* I think an Eastern origin for the writing system is very much worth exploring (but not that far East). I'm learning some more about the Mongolian scripts, and their predecessors the Uighur and Pahlavi scripts. Some interesting things have caught my eye, which may not lead anywhere, but make this writing tradition worth a look:

1. A relative paucity of discrete glyphs
   
2. A system of within-word vowel harmony, whereby back and front vowels cannot occur in a word together, but the neutral / mid vowel /a/ can go with either, creating a writing system that only has and only requires three distinct vowel glyphs for 5~7 vowels, because the other vowel signs in the word determine which pronunciation you say. Could You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the apparent paucity of vowel candidates by most Hidden Markov Models together comprise the Voynichese analog to Mongolian intra-word vowel harmony?
   
3. A set of rules by which certain types of tails are always attached to certain glyphs in word-end position
   
4. The fact that the Mongolian alphabet was both syncretic, and in turn itself adapted to a wide variety of languages over a fairly wide area.
   
5. The Mongolian languages sometimes end words with "-aiin".
   

Don't take that last point too seriously. Or any of these conjectures about Mongolian. All I'm saying is, the cold strip of steppe between the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, all the way east to modern day Barnaúl, Dunhuang, and Ulaanbataar is a relatively unexplored, and linguistically interesting, place to look for VMS origin clues.

Great chatting with you and please stick around.
— Dave

The problems I have with a Chinese origin are that the zodiac in the VMS is the standard European (originally Babylonian) one, the nymphs don't look even remotely Chinese, and the swallowtail merlons in one of the illustrations are an Italian architectural feature.   However, if you still want to proceed on the assumption it's encoded Chinese, be aware of the difference between traditional and simplified characters.  The simplified characters used today, adopted only after the 1949 revolution, didn't exist when the VMS was created, and still haven't been adopted in Taiwan or Hong Kong.  Also, the modern written language (which is based on Mandarin) is only 100 years old, adopted after the 1911 revolution.   Prior to its adoption, Classical Chinese was written and this was very different from modern standard Chinese.

Apart from the fact that the drawings have 0% eastern inspiration, you could try to look at the romanization of the variant of the language you are looking at and try to see if you find a match on syllables.