The Voynich Ninja

(12-02-2026, 03:04 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.All I can say is that the SPS seems to correspond to the SBJ almost word-for-word. 

I'm not sure that can be said. At best, you've found 1 word that roughly lines up in the SPS and SBJ. For all we know, there was another recipe in the SBJ of roughly the same length, with roughly the same distribution of 主. 

If you could present a 2nd or 3rd word which also nicely lines up with the SBJ, even then you could only say that "The SPS seems to roughly match the format of the SBJ, with a few common words having similar positions in each"

Its just as possible that a recipe entirely unrelated to the SBJ, on a completely different subject, could also have the same relative positions of the phrase "it is used to" as is found for daiin in the SPS.

(12-02-2026, 01:06 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You'll agree with me that leading with "this paper proves the Starred paragraph section is the SBJ" when your "proof" is a poorly fitted positional analysis is borderline delusional. I have nothing against the Chinese theory, however I have to reiterate that to make certain claims one needs strong evidence. If the paper had only suggested that daiin COULD be zhu then ok, but it doesn't, it takes it much further.

The whole Chinese theory argument appears preposterous to me, but it still can be a learning opportunity and a good thought experiment on how decoding a phonetic transcription of a monosyllabic language may play out.

It appears to me that after dealing with the Chinese theory for a while, Jorge_Stolfi has nearly 100% probability of the Chinese theory being correct, likely from many small pieces of evidence, because I haven't seen a smoking gun yet. I can't know if this probability is justified, my own probability of the eastern origin is nearly zero. 

Unfortunately, most arguments are presented from ~100% Chinese point of view and are not designed to work to "prove it's Chinese", but to work under "we know it's Chinese, explain why it's like this".

(12-02-2026, 01:06 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the second point, then it follows that if this isn't literally chinese, then daiin isn't literally zhu or zhu zhi, and the SBS isn't the SBJ. Language is important, if one makes an announcement of this magnitude (possibly THE biggest breakthrough in cracking the VM if this is correct) then I am expecting a lot more than "it could be this, but also that", because this is also what the turkish, the irish and a bunch of other theories do.

Even if the language is not literal Chinese, it might be still possible to match word patterns. A very good example of how these patterns are almost preserved is in the Google translation that is used in the paper. Each 主 roughly corresponds to one "use" in the English translation, with one extra "use" thrown in by Google translate to make the wording smoother in English.

Quote:Zhu is followed 5 out of 7 times by zhi, once by zia and once by sha. There is no such pattern in the VM. The fact that daiir and odaiin have to be fitted to be daiin to even have a semblance of a match here speaks for itself.

Quote:This is not a problem, the theory doesn't suggest literally Chinese, but some eastern language with monosyllable structure, so it's ok if the patterns are not fully matched.

I don't know if Voynichese is some Oriental language or not and don't feel competent to discuss it.

But the paper we talk about makes a claim that I feel competent enough to discuss.
It claims that Quire 20 of Voynich Manuscript is a version of  classical Chinese text called Sennong Bencao Jing.

Then it compares one paragraph of both text claiming that the bottom paragraph on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the paragraph about a rooster (I guess Jorge preffered to avoid "cock" word   ) from Sennong Bencao Jing.

But they just don't match. One word may match after some gymnastics but other don't. Most words are unique in the paragraph (hapax legomena) but there are some repetitions and Chinese repetitions don't match Voynichese repetitions as I tried to show in my earlier post.

And if the identification of the text as Sennong Bencao Jing is weak then identification of "zhu" as "daiin" is equally weak.

Jorge, are you able to propose what otaiin, okaiin and qokaiin could mean?

(12-02-2026, 02:28 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Jorge, are you able to propose what otaiin, okaiin and qokaiin could mean?

Could be "its", "and", "is", "are", if features like these are missing in Chinese, but exist in the original eastern language of the Chinese theory. If we are talking about oriental languages, these also could be classifiers (similar to European articles, but specific to a particular type of objects). The fact that one language has a pattern of repeated words that is missing from another language doesn't mean that the texts are not a direct translation.

Compare the Chinese original and the English translation in the article, the English translation has quite a few recurrent words that have no correspondence in the Chinese text.

Quote:Could be "its", "and", "is", "are", if features like these are missing in Chinese, but exist in the original eastern language of the Chinese theory.

Okay, so we say now it is not Chinese but some other unknown Oriental language of unknown vocabulary, grammar and everything. By chance it has the same patterns as Chinese for "use" word in one paragraph but different patterns for other words.

How am I supposed to discuss with it? How is it verfiable?

Definitely it is not my burden to search for such language now. It's the duty of the persons who suggested it. 

If you claim that fairies exist it is your job to prove it and not my job to prove that they don't exist.

I still think Korean should be looked at - 1420 would be right when King Sejong was inventing a new writing system for Korean and perhaps Voynichese was an earlier, failed attempt before he and his monks settled on we now know as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl. What noone has done yet, is take a text in 15th century Korean, expand the Hangul syllable blocks into the individual jamo (the phonetic components making up the blocks), and run the statistics on that. Another possibility that should be taken into account is Chinese with Korean pronunciation. See if there's any text from the 15th century that the Korean pronunciation of the hanja (Chinese characters) written in hangul, and do the same process with it - expand every syllable block into its constituent jamo and then run the statistics on the result. Even better would be if any copy of the SBJ was found from 15th century Korea, preferably written in hangul, then that could be compared with Voynichese.

(12-02-2026, 12:46 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am sorry but page 8 has absolutely 0 evidence

I am sorry if those news upset you so much.

The word daiin was not cherry-picked: it is the most common word in the SPS.

The character 主 was not cherry-picked: it is the most common character in the SBJ.

Paragraph f105v.32-38 was not cherry-picked: it is the longest parag in the SPS.

The "Rooster" recipe was not cherry-picked: it is the longest recipe in the SBJ

As you can see from the plot and on page 8, the positions were daiin occurs on f105v.32-38
are spaced very irregularly.  So are the occurrences of 主 in the "Rooster" recipe.

But the positions of five of the latter match closely all the positions of the former.  When divided by the average parag length in each file, the intervals between the five matching pairs are (SPS:SBJ) 0.65:0.67, 0.20:0.23, 0.30:0.30, and 0.42:0.42.  

There is a fixed shift of ~1.5 between the SPS and the SBJ, but that matches the length of the first sentence of the recipe, which specifies the taste and "warmth" of the "rooster".  That field makes no sense for this "recipe" since it covers many products extracted from the bird, from the lining of the gizzard to the quills and its poo.  It was probably added when the book was reconstructed after the 1500s, "because every recipe must have that field", and may not have been present in the version from which the SPS was sourced.

Another discrepancy is that the length of the SPS parag, in that same scale, is shorter than the "Rooster" recipe by 0.36 units.  But that value matches the length of the last two sentences of the SPS entry. One is about veterinarian uses of the "rooster", and there seem to be claims that it too is a later addition, since the SBJ generally does not cover veterinary medicine.  The second one says that one may find "Rooster" growing in marshlands; which again makes no sense for this recipe, and must have been added by the rebuilders "because every recipe must have that field".  So, again, either those sentences were missing in the version that the Author used as source for the SPS, or he omitted them because they made no sense.

I suppose that you are not into numbers and thus do not find those coincidences remarkable.  But if you still think they are coincidences, please find some other old book (in Latin, German, Swahili, Navajo, whatever), on any topic (a personal diary, a ship log, a daily weather report, a list of salacious Sumerian proverbs, the Collected Tweets of Roger Bacon, whatever), that has parag size histograms with min, max, and average even remotely similar to those of the SPS.  And if you find such a book, then find a parag P and a word W in it such that W occurs at least five times in P, and the positions of five of those occurrences match those of daiin in f105v.32-39 with, say 10% accuracy.

I will be waiting...

All the best, --stolfi

(12-02-2026, 03:31 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Okay, so we say now it is not Chinese but some other unknown Oriental language of unknown vocabulary, grammar and everything. By chance it has the same patterns as Chinese for "use" word in one paragraph but different patterns for other words.

To be fair, I think it was described from the very beginning of the Chinese theory that the language is not necessarily Chinese, but some eastern monosyllabic language. The patterns for 'use' in English also closely mimic the pattern in Chinese, but English adds a lot of other recurring words, so in principle this could work.

As for the rest, I agree. Completely unverifiable and practically zero evidence so far.

(12-02-2026, 04:29 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The character 主 was not cherry-picked: it is the most common character in the SBJ.

主 appears at the very beginning of each recipe, after the name and the category, with only 2-3 exceptions. If 主 corresponds to daiin, where is the same pattern in the Voynich MS? Is there a guaranteed daiin near the beginning of each paragraph? This is visually the most obvious pattern in SBJ.

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(12-02-2026, 03:31 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By chance it has the same patterns as Chinese for "use" word in one paragraph but different patterns for other words.

"Use" is the only word that is repeated more than a few times in that recipe.  Some characters occur 2-3 times, but are parts of compounds with very different meanings, thus their readings in another language -- even in another Chinese "dialect" -- may have no sound in common.

The phrase 肶胵裹黄皮= "the yellow lining of the gizzard" is read in modern Mandarin as "pí chī guǒ huáng pí", with the same "pí" sound twice.  But the characters 肶 and 皮 are homophones -- unrelated words that happen to have the same sound in Mandarin, like "two" and "too" in English.  But in modern Cantonese (the dialect of Shanghai and Hong Kong), those same five characters are read as "bei2 ci3 gwo2 wong4 pei2".  Note that 肶 and 皮 now have different sounds.

The character 子 zǐ, which has the general meaning of "child", occurs twice in that recipe; but once as part of the compound 女子 nǚ zǐ = "woman" and once as part of 鸡子 jī zǐ = "eggs" (literally "bird children").  According to Google translate, in  Cantonese the first one would be replaced by 女人 neoi5 jan2 (where 人 generally means "person"), while the second would still be written with the same characters (only in the "traditional" style 雞子) and pronounced "gai1 zi2".  So the "zǐ" would not be repeated.  And in Vietnamese 女子 translates as "phụ nữ" while 鸡子 is "trứng"..

The failure for other repeated characters probably have the same explanation.  However there is a repetition of 寒 hán = "cold" in 伤寒寒热 shāng hán hán rè = "typhoid fever with alternating chills and fever" whose position approximately matches ytaiin.otair in the SPS text; and I have already noted that y and o seem to be equivalent (by nature or by error) and same for in and r...

All the best, --stolfi

PS.  And you, Rafal, of all people here, should understand these points better.   How did you discover the meaning of all those symbols in the Rohonc codex? Did you categorically determine the translation of all of them? Can you describe the language's grammar?