The Voynich Ninja

(07-12-2025, 05:51 PM)Doireannjane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We can’t definitively say something was a rosary based off of image or even a clear reference alone without understanding the text/context.

The point stands; this is not particularly interesting as we don't have a generally accepted understanding of the text/context. The point (or at least one point) of analyzing the images and trying to understand them on their own is to gather evidence for a possible future translation that is actually convincing.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-12-2025, 03:06 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is there an attested Chinese tradition of representing the 24 solar terms with abstract circular diagrams?

I could not find any depiction of each solar term as a circular diagram with 15 labeled slices.  But I did only a very superficial search.  I owe you that one. What comes up all the time is single circular diagram with the 24 solar stations.

You hopefully begin to see my problem! I'm not objecting to the idea of locating this textual tradition outside of Europe; I'm objecting to the fact it's not been found, and pointing to indicators that it might not be there.

Moreover, under the stricter thought experiment you give, this arrangement does not appear in any of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that a Ming informant would have chosen if asked for "most important". (I'm willing to grant the informant may have been heterodox in this regard, but I think this kind of supposition goes to the bigger point I'm getting at.)

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, how common are depictions of the Western Zodiac where each sign is depicted as a separate diagram with 30 individually labeled slices?

If this is a problem for a European origin, it is certainly a problem for a Chinese one!

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Does that tradition link them to the somewhat uncommon 12 zodiac sign divisions of the ecliptic?

Again, those 24 solar terms were apparently grouped or spanned by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. associated with 12 animals (Tiger, Rabbit, etc).  IIUC, they are about 15 days displaced from the Western Zodiac divisions. These labels are not specific to that use; they were used since antiquity to number things in any set of 12 things.  They are the same labels used in China to label the years in a 12-year cycle.

But without a description of how it is being used here---and I understand the difficulties of this without a translation, it is a fundamental problem with all theories to date---there is nothing concrete here beyond linking two sets of 12. If the artist did know about the Chinese zodiac and chose to link it to the earthly branches through the European one, that is an odd choice that needs more evidence. If they did not know what the text said, then any link is an incredible coincidence.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Would the Ming literati have considered this tradition among their most important, in line with the way you present the VMS scribe asking for the most important books?

I didn't check the dates, but those 24 solar terms seem to be still very important, with festivals and customs attached to specific points.  (For example,立春=lìchūn is the first point on that 360-degree cycle. For astronomical reasons I didn't understand, sometimes a year of the lunar calendar falls entirely between two consecutive lìchūn solar points, so that there is no lìchūn in that year; and it is considered unlucky to marry in such a year.)

The reason this can happen is precisely because the solar terms are secondary in this system. The year is fundamentally a lunar phenomenon, lasting 12 or 13 months, defined as the time between new moons. The way this is reconciled with solar accounting is by fixing the winter solstice in the 11th month, and more accurately the start of Dongzhi, to after the 11th new moon. If you count backwards to the first month, you get the New Year. Because a year can be as short as 354 days and because the new moon wanders against the solar terms, it's possible for a year to completely miss Lichun. So while the solar terms are important, there are only two days they are directly important for; the start of Dongzhi and the start of Lichun.

And no, Lichun is not the first point in a 360-degree cycle. It is the first point in a 24-degree cycle. (Note, however, in the zodiac interpretation you're relying on, the cycle begins with dàxuě because rat is first.) Chinese astronomy did not make use of 360 degrees until they adopted European practice. It's possible we're looking at a European overlay with those 30 stars per page, but there is nothing about that which demands a Chinese reading.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:You can assign the zodiac animals this way; rabbit, dragon, snake, and so on. This gives a superficial resemblance to the Babylonian zodiac, but both the derivation and practice are quite different.

But, apart from the decoration, there is hardly any similarity between the VMS Zodiac and Western (Babilonian) Zodiac, is there?  We have what was presumably 12 diagrams with 30 labeled "things" each (not 28/29/30/31), but two of those at the beginning are split into four diagrams of 15 "things".  Why is that more similar to the Western Zodiac than to the Chinese solar terms?

The manuscript is extremely difficult to definitively place, but again, that is no less true for China.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote: I know what you're going to have me do. I'm going to be asked to imagine a fictional story where this superficial resemblance is seized on by a Voynich artist. But none of that is in evidence!

Indeed, that is a superficial resemblance.  Even if the VMS Zodiac section was about Western astrology, with one page for each "sign", the diagram on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. would have nothing to do with scorpions, dragons, or whatever that thing in the center is.  It would be three lines of text about a certain interval of the year, and a list of 30 words, presumably associated to the days in that interval.  That would be its contents.  The drawing at the center is just decoration.  We presume that the interval in question is ~10-24 to ~11-22 because we deduce that the drawings should have been a scorpion, based on the drawings of adjacent pages; and the Western Scorpio sign is that interval.  But what evidence is there that the intervals covered by each diagram matches the Western Zodiac divisions?

Central to my point is that when you start undermining the evidence like this, it hurts the Chinese theory as well. Perhaps what we see cannot be relied upon to form a theory. But if it is mere decoration, then there is little reason to have this discussion about the Chinese zodiac.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(By the way, the Western Scorpio sign seems to be astride the Dog and Pig branches of the Chinese 12-branch solar calendar.  Could that "scorpion" drawing be actually a dog? Or a dog-pig hybrid?  Both were eaten in China, it seems, so it would make sense to develop such hybrids.   Hmmm...  Another budding theory there?  )

I was a disappointed to see this joke, to be honest.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:It is inherently problematic for the Chinese Theory that it requires a just-so story to explain away the mismatch here, first because it's pure speculation and then again because it's a plain admission that inconvenient parts of the manuscript must be speculated away. The actual premise of your argument here is that the manuscript is, at least in part, not copied from Chinese sources.

I don't get what you mean by "just-so story". 

A just-so story is a fictional story to explain how something ended up exactly the way it did. Aside from assuming a monosyllabic language to explain the entropy data, I don't think anything about your dictator or scribe or Chinese texts (or "Chinese" texts) is at all real. An intriguing thought experiment, but for now only that.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would that include the secret community of daiin worshippers who needed to communicate their heresies in a devilishly complex code, and filled the VMS with bogus drawings to throw the inquisitors off their track?  Or the Swiss doctor who made it a point of deforming every detail of every plant on his herbal, even the very common ones, to protect his secret formulas?

How do the European Origin theories handle those discrepancies -- the unidentifiable and absurd plants, the fixed 30 days per sign of the Zodiac, the incomprehensible cosmic diagrams, ...?

Flipping the burden of proof would be a problem for my point here if I were advocating with certainty that the VMS represented an underlying European text. I am not, so this is not relevant to my point.

Quote:On the other hand, the differences above imply that the VMS artist did not understand what those details were supposed to be, or the meaning of the allegory.

I agree.
And I would go even further. For me it strongly suggests that the artist wasn't a monk because a monk would know how to tell a rosary from some chain.
For me Voynich Manuscript is almost totally lacking any religious symbolism and when there is one thing connected somehow to religion it is done wrong.

It is important observation that would contradict some theories, but yes, I cannot prove it 100%

From today I will be believing that the Voynich scribe was some "drone" guy who was good in writing but bad in drawing and didn't really understand what he was drawing, problably was copying from some pictures. It suggests some "secretary" guy working for his master.

I agree that most of the Voynich doesn’t appear religious. I disagree about your super speculative last paragraph. I think the writer(s) would have known the references and repurposed them/combined them with the intended  educational ideas, for them to be more applicable/connected to their audience/readers. It is reasonable to assume given the section themes, this was a more educational manuscript as opposed to a religiously oriented one.

(07-12-2025, 06:32 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What comes up all the time is single circular diagram with the 24 solar stations.

I'm not objecting to the idea of locating this textual tradition outside of Europe; I'm objecting to the fact it's not been found, and pointing to indicators that it might not be there.

Not sure I get this point.  The "24 x 15 degree" calendar may not be as important in "Chinese" culture as the luni-solar calendar based on moons and days; but it has been a real thing for centuries, and is well known and used, even today. 

Quote:This arrangement does not appear in any of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that a Ming informant would have chosen if asked for "most important".

But none of  those nine books are about subjects that the putative Author would have cared about.  Whatever the origin of the VMS, it is clear that the Author cared about medicine, herbal remedies, and astrology -- and the latter, at the time and for several centuries after, was considered to be the foundation of medicine.  

In fact I believe that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in some version of translation, is the source of the Starred Parags section.  It is an ancient classic, but not one of thee "Four Books and Five Classics" of Confucianism.

Quote:

(04-12-2025, 05:03 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, how common are depictions of the Western Zodiac where each sign is depicted as a separate diagram with 30 individually labeled slices?

If this is a problem for a European origin, it is certainly a problem for a Chinese one!

Again, I don't know how to look for images of circular diagrams of individual 15-degree sectors of the Chinese solar calendar.  My searches only turn up circular diagrams of the whole year divided into the 24 sectors, which are all over the place.

Quote:If the artist did know about the [24x15] Chinese zodiac and chose to link it to the earthly branches through the European one, that is an odd choice that needs more evidence. If they did not know what the text said, then any link is an incredible coincidence.

Again: in my version of the "Chinese" theory, the "Chinese" source book from which the VMS Zodiac section is derived specified only a list of 360 labels, associated with that many "stations" -- points on the Ecliptic, at 1 degree intervals.  These labels were divided into 24 sets of 15, each with a two-character Chinese name.  The position of each station on the Ecliptic also determined an approximate date in the Chinese and Western 365-day calendars (modulo shifts caused by the sync of the moon orbit; or, in the Western calendar, by leap years).   

The Author must have known at least this much. 

The same 360 Ecliptic points were also grouped into 12 sets of 30, the "Earthly branches", each associated with a "counting animal".  But this organization seems to have been less important than the 24x15 one, and the Author may not have known about it.

When the Author set out to put down this information as the VMS Zodiac section, he had to choose the format. Probably interactively with the Artist/Scribe, to account for the size of the pages etc.  The chosen design was 10 diagrams with 30 labels each (two missing), and four of 15 labels each. 

As part of planning the layout, the Author decided to associate these 12+4 VMS Zodiac diagrams with Western Zodiac signs, and he told the Artist to draw the corresponding Western sign at the center of each diagram.

I cannot guess whether the VMS Zodiac diagrams correspond  to the 15- or 30- degree sectors of the Chinese solar calendar, or whether the Author decided to shift everything by some number of degrees.  That is, I cannot guess whether  the labels on VMS Pisces and Aries I are those of Chinese solar points 1 to 30 and 21 to 45, or (say) the solar points 27 to 56 and 57 to 71.  

Thus I don't know whether the Chinese solar points whose labels appear in the VMS diagram with the Pisces sign at the center span the date interval that is defined as "Pisces" in the Western Zodiac.  Or whether the correspondence is off by  any number of days.

But the point is not that Chinese Astrologers divided the year into 12 parts. Both the Chinese and the Europeans did so.  The point is the the Chinese were used to dividing the year into 360 degrees (not just 365 days) and to group those degrees into 24 sets of exactly 15 each, or (perhaps less commonly) into 12 sets of exactly 30 each.

I suppose that European astronomers (not common folk, not ordinary astrologers) understood the 12 signs as being 12 sectors of 30 degrees of the Ecliptic.  But did they ever group them into 24 sectors of 15, like the Chinese routinely did?

Quote:The year is fundamentally a lunar phenomenon, lasting 12 or 13 months, defined as the time between new moons

Not sure what you mean by "fundamentally".  

The year is the time it takes for the Earth go complete one orbit around the Sun.  The lunar month is the time it takes for the Moon to complete one orbit around the Earth, relative to the Sun.  One day is the time it takes for the Earth to complete one full revolution, relative to the Sun.  The three periods are incommensurate and developed independently over the eons.

So there is nothing astronomically "fundamental" in trying to measure the year or lunar month by counting days, or measure the year by counting lunar months.  It is just that human activity is synchronized to the day cycle, and integers are easier to understand than irrational real numbers...

Quote:Lichun is not the first point in a 360-degree cycle. It is the first point in a 24-degree cycle.

Lìchūn is the first point of the first 15-degree sector, specifically, of the 360-degree cycle. 

Quote:Chinese astronomy did not make use of 360 degrees until they adopted European practice.

AFAIK, in the 1600s there was a change in the specific way the positions of solar terms were defined, to make them more accurate and meaningful astronomically.  But that change did not change the idea of the solar terms being 360 and grouped into 24 sets of 15.

Quote:A just-so story is a fictional story to explain how something ended up exactly the way it did. An intriguing thought experiment, but for now only that.

As I tried to explain in my Voynich Day talk, in any study of the VMS you cannot avoid assuming some Origin Theory, aka "fictional story to explain how the VMS ended up exactly as we see it".  

Those who try to "crack" it by assuming it is an encrypted European language must postulate the story that some European wanted to write European heretical thoughts and encrypted them to keep them secret.  

Those who want to prove it is meaningless gibberish must  make up the story that some educated guy thought of making money by selling a random text to some gullible rich man.

And so on... these stories are just  as "just-so" as the Chinese theory.

Quote:Aside from assuming a monosyllabic language to explain the entropy data

More than the h2 profile, the evidence that got me convinced that the language is "Chinese" was the distribution of lengths of words in the lexicon, and their rigid structure with a finite number of segments, each with a different set of choices.   Other evidence has  only confirmed that.  

Quote:Flipping the burden of proof would be a problem for my point here if I were advocating with certainty that the VMS represented an underlying European text. I am not, so this is not relevant to my point.

OK.  So, if you are not assuming that the underlying language is European, why are you so negative about it being a "Chinese" (East Asian monosyllabic) language?

All the best, --stolfi

(07-12-2025, 09:50 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As I tried to explain in my Voynich Day talk, in any study of the VMS you cannot avoid assuming some Origin Theory, aka "fictional story to explain how the VMS ended up exactly as we see it". 

But not everyone may agree with your claim that each of us must assume an Origin/language theory. 

Especially if this is what is leading you to conclude that people think it is a cypher because - and only because -  they believe the language is (Indo?)European.  And that criticism of the Chinese Theory stems from people's belief that the language is European.

Quote:OK.  So, if you are not assuming that the underlying language is European, why are you so negative about it being a "Chinese" (East Asian monosyllabic) language?  

I can't speak for rikforto's reasons. But it is perfectly possible for someone to criticize the Chinese Theory because they find the evidence unpersuasive for it and therefore see the theory as unproven.  Or even because they think the absence of certain evidence makes the theory not only unproven but unlikely.  

It doesn't necessitate a conviction that the language is Indo European.  Plenty of people criticized the Turkish theory, and it wasn't because they were convinced the language could not be Turkish because it was Latin.  

You stressed a couple of times in this thread that your belief was driven by evidence, but I feel you're not allowing for the possibility that this applies to others who disagree with you, when you make sweeping statements about why they hold their positions.

(07-12-2025, 11:50 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I can't speak for rikforto's reasons. But it is perfectly possible for someone to criticize the Chinese Theory because they find the evidence unpersuasive for it and therefore see the theory as unproven.  Or even because they think the absence of certain evidence makes the theory not only unproven but unlikely.

This is the crux of it, more or less. And with that in mind...

(07-12-2025, 09:50 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In fact I believe that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in some version of translation, is the source of the Starred Parags section.  It is an ancient classic, but not one of thee "Four Books and Five Classics" of Confucianism.

I'm going to ice all our other disagreements here and take a serious look at this. It will take me at least a few days, so I will get back to you. I doubt I'll be able to say anything truly definitive, but I might be able to say something useful about this.

My intuition tells me it is not Chinese but I'll be happy to see Jorge elaborating his theory and going from very general hypotheses to something more concrete.

But will it ever happen?

Jorge, do I presume correctly that you don't speak Chinese?
If so, do you actually see any chance that you will push it further and at some moment assign some Voynichese words to Chinese words?

This thread is worth reading, especially posts by ChenZheChina, ReneZ, MarcoP, ... --> You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-12-2025, 11:50 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-12-2025, 09:50 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As I tried to explain in my Voynich Day talk, in any study of the VMS you cannot avoid assuming some Origin Theory, aka "fictional story to explain how the VMS ended up exactly as we see it". 

But not everyone may agree with your claim that each of us must assume an Origin/language theory. 

To be clear, by "must" I did not mean some sort of obligation, like "one must provide evidence" or "one must be civil and impersonal".  I meant an unavoidable law of nature.  Any analysis or measurement one does on the VMS implies some assumption about how it was created.  

For instance, when one counts and compares occurrences of digraphs per page (the basis of Currier's A and B classification), one is implicitly  assuming that each page was composed in a single language and encoding.  As opposed to each page having some variable number of lines in each of two languages.  Or any one of 17 languages.

Quote:[you think] that people think it is a cypher because - and only because -  they believe the language is (Indo?)European.

Well, why do people think it is a cipher (meaning a non-trivial cryptographic encoding of a natural language) and not a plaintext (a simple phonetic or letter substitution of the same)?  

If one takes a manuscript book from the 1400s at random from a shelf, a  priori -- before opening it -- one should assign probability near 1 to it being plaintext; because the vast majority of such books are plaintexts, and moreover a cipher is much more laborious to write and read.  

So the common belief that the VMS is a cipher must be based on what they see after they have looked into it.  What exactly is the reasoning that leads people to that belief?

Quote:it is perfectly possible for someone to criticize the Chinese Theory because they find the evidence unpersuasive for it and therefore see the theory as unproven.  Or even because they think the absence of certain evidence makes the theory not only unproven but unlikely.

Probabilities add to 1.  When one assigns low probability to "Chinese", one is assigning probability near 1 to "not Chinese".   Shouldn't that theory be based on evidence too?

All the best, --stolfi