(08-05-2026, 05:35 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From a purely rhetorical standpoint---I've made my doubts about the identification itself abundantly clear and have nothing new to add at this time---I think it bears mentioning how much strain the "SPS = SBJ" identification puts on what I took to be basic tenants of the "Chinese Theory":
As I wrote before, those who are convinced that the VMS is encrypted have come to expect that a valid solution will be like the solution to a typical cryptographic puzzle. Namely, someone deduces the encryption algorithm, inverts it, and presto -- it
automatically turns the whole VMS into a plausible
original plaintext in a
known language, with few or any spelling errors, with common vocabulary and proper orthography and grammar. They rightly dismiss "solutions" where the the decryption "algorithm" requires manual tuning or picking alternatives at every step. They know that, with such slack, any random string can be "decrypted" into a text in any language, that is grammatically correct and sort of kinda like seems to make sense. At least, if one does not read more than one sentence at a time.
But the "SPS=SBJ" theory implies that the VMS is
not encrypted; and that the authorship, motivation, means, and creation process are totally unlike those of encrypted documents, Medieval or not. Thus the VMS is not a
cryptographic puzzle, but more like a
lost language puzzle. And solutions to problems of this type are not clean, instantaneous, automatic. There will be no "decryption algorithm".
And I understand that those who casually browse through this thread and see that I must accept variant spellings and splitting of words, omitted parts, unknown language, etc. may get the impression that the matching of SBJ entries to SPS parags has enough slack to "succeed" independently of whether the theory is correct or not. To see that such is not the case one has to look at the proposed matchings (like the Rooster or Bee Larva one) and estimate the probability that the keyword-to-keyword distances could match that well by mere chance.
Quote:[The COT says that]Voynichese is phonetic
Most likely. The statistics and word structure are compatible also with some codebook-like cipher; but that would be extremely impractical for a book of this size.
Quote:Voynichese word breaks delineate syllables; Tiltman's "suffixes" are treated as words to get enough -aiin-type endings in the Rooster identification, though I am aware that another theory properly on another thread underwrites this
Mostly, yes. Independently of the COT or of the SPS=SBJ claim, the structure of most Voynichese "words" is consistent with each "word" being a single syllable. However, in a small fraction of cases, the structure of the "word" is consistent with it being two or more syllables stuck together.
Conversely, the existence of dubious word spaces means that, in some cases, a VMS "word" may be only part of a syllable. Some of those cases are marked by commas in the transcription, but there must be many cases where the spurious break is marked with a period.
By the way, note that in Mandarin (and presumably in all other candidate languages) a syllable may be just a single vowel, without any consonant. Thus, when the Dictator read 辟恶 "pì è" the Author may have written down "piè".
Nevertheless, one important piece of evidence for the SPS=SBJ claim is that, after removing the fields that were (consistently) omitted by the Author,
on average each Chinese character corresponds almost exactly to one VMS "word" -- a bit more if commas are treated as spaces, a bit less of commas are ignored.
Moreover, even tough each word has a variable number of EVA letters,
on average each Chinese character corresponds rather closely to 5 EVA letters, not counting spaces.
These ratios are verified not only in the total length of the entries, but also in the spacing between keywords. For instance, here is the SBJ entry named "dragon bone" (which is actually about fossil bones):
<b1.4.090> 73 hanzi
龙骨味甘平主治心腹鬼注精物老魅咳逆泄利脓血女子漏下症瘕坚结小儿热气惊痫齿主治小儿 大人惊痫癫疾狂走心下结气不能喘息诸痉杀精物久服轻身通神明延年生山谷
Excluding the parts that are consistently omitted in the VMS (the "Flavor" 味甘平 , the "Provenance" 生山谷, and the patient type tags 女子 = "women", 小儿 = "children", and 小儿大人 = "children and adults") we are left with this:
<b1.4.090> 59 hanzi
2 龙骨
2 13 主治 心腹鬼注精物老魅咳逆泄利脓
1 7 血 漏下症瘕坚结热
1 3 气 惊痫齿
2 9 主治 惊痫癫疾狂走心下结
1 9 气 不能喘息诸痉杀精物
2 7 久服 轻身通神明延年
The third column has the keywords in that entry for which I have a tentative VMS translation: 主治 = "main uses", 血 = "blood", 久服 = "prolonged consumption", etc.. The fourth column are the strings before, between, and after those keywords. The first two columns are the respective character counts.
This trimmed entry has 59 hanzi (Chinese characters), so by the proportion observed so far we expect the matching SPS paragraph to have about 59 x 5.06 = ~298 EVA letters. And indeed the best matching SPS parag has 285 letters:
<f104v.1> 3.15 285(-13) 0.200
3(-7) 1.94 pch
daiin 64(-1) 0.00 opcheedyoraroltcheeyopchedyolearaiiralycheodaiincheekaindamyched
aiinqot 37(+1) 0.01 eedchockhyotaiinydaiinqokamdyotararal
chedo 25(+9) 0.94 tairoramshodchedyqotaiino
daiin 47(+1) 0.01 okeolockhhycholqokeedyqotairoeedaiinoldlqoteedy
cheda 44(-1) 0.01 iinchokarqotolqotchedcholcheyqolchedyqoeeeyq
okeedy 32(-3) 0.04 dcheolchdeeyoeeodainsairolchedal
Here the first column is my tentative VMS translation of the keywords identified in the SBJ entry. Namely, the 主治 keyword is assumed to correspond to the first occurrence of daiin, its "canonical" translation. The character 血 is matched with the EVA string aiinqot which seems to be highly correlated with it in other pairs (although the 血 may in fact turnout to be only part of that string). And so on.
The discrepancy between the actual and predicted total lengths is -13 EVA letters (~4%), which would be equivalent to ~1.6 hanzi on the original.
Moreover, the counts of EVA letters between the VMS keywords also match the counts of hanzi between the hanzi keywords. For instance, the gap between 主治 and 血 in the SBJ entry is 13 hanzi long. The corresponding gap in the SPS was therefore expected to be 13 x 5.06 = ~65 EVA letters. In fact the gap between the first daiin and the next aiinqot is 64 letters, of just one letter (equivalent to ~0.2 hanzi) short from the expectation. And the same holds for the other six gaps. The biggest discrepancy is in the gap between the first 气=chedo after the aiinqot and the next daiin, which is 25 EVA letters instead of the predicted 3 x 5.06 = ~16; a discrepancy of +9 EVA letters (equivalent to 1.8 hanzi).
Can you claim that those numbers are just chance coincidences?
Quote:Voynichese is "Chinese", better expressed as "From the Mainland Southeast Asian Language Area"; Japanese largely lacks finals and is very amicable to Romanization, though I do recognize other proposals are still in play)
I don't understand what you mean by "lacks finals". As @Jonas_Barnun explained, if the Dictator was Japanese, he probably read each Chinese character as a single syllable, with its "Chinese" reading. So that "Japanese" language would be essentially another "dialect" of Chinese.
Quote:"Chinese"/MSEA Languages account for the low entropy; the many-to-one match system destabilizes the connection with the entropy data
The trope that the VMS has "low entropy" is about
character entropy, that depends entirely on the spelling system and the transcription alphabet. IIRC the
word entropy, that does not depend on spelling or encoding, is well in the normal range -- about 10 bits per word.
Variant spellings, spelling errors, missing or spurious word spaces, etc. can affect the word entropy; but some will increase it, some will decrease it. Thus even a 10% error rate would have little effect on the word entropy.
Quote:paradoxically, I think accepting "SPS = SBJ" increasingly looks like rejecting much of the "Chinese Theory".
Well, strictly speaking the two theories are independent. The SPS being a translation/transcription of the SBJ does not imply that it was created like the COT proposed. Maybe a bored Chinese ship doctor stranded in Alexandria encoded the whole SBJ with a codebook cipher, replacing each Chinese character with a randomly assigned number in some Roman-like number notation, just to kill time while waiting for the monsoon season to be over; and that papyrus manuscript was then copied onto paper by a Venetian merchant, whose widow then sold it to a Bavarian doctor from Trent who donated it to a convent near Basel where it was copied onto vellum by the convent's five dirty lesbian nuns dreaming of hot baths. But ...
All the best, --stolfi