The Voynich Ninja

(14-05-2026, 11:57 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is both incredibly rude and extremely revealing projection.

Well, apologies for that, but that bizarre story about every emperor changing the solar terms on a whim for political expediency looked a lot like a lalamo hallucination.

Quote:I assure you, only one of us is contaminating this conversation with "AI" garbage.

I have always made it clear where I was using information from Google AI or ChatGPT.  I must do so a lot because I can't read Chinese.  But the scholarly sources that the lalamos cite seem to agree with their claim: the "bare" SBJ (the text on my website, which I claim is the source of the Starred Parags section) could have been easily obtained from the medical books circulating in the 1300-1400 time frame, because it was clearly marked off by color and/or font size and/or negative print.  

That alleged counter-example you provided, taken from the Zenghe Bencao (ZHB) file at the Chinese Texts Project (CTP), did not work because that digital text was obtained by OCR from black and white scans, as shown on that site itself (directly checked, not an "AI garbage" claim).  Therefore the green/black coloring in the digital file encoded only the font size.  Did that that particular print of that particular 11th century medical book use red color in the big font parts to distinguish the "pure" 3rd century BC SBJ text from the 6th century additions? I don't know -- and neither do you.

Quote:Before we get into the weeds here, a quick gut check. Does multiple recensions in a single entry seem like a good sign for your claim that this was still widely agreed upon in wide circulation? Or does it seem to comport with the evidence I already showed that prior to these intense scholarly reconstructions that there was no stable SBJ tradition? ... You seem to have missed it, but I found a text much closer to the assumed age of the VMS that didn't make mention of chickens but claimed to have the entries of the SBJ

The existence of multiple recensions means that the SBJ text was more available than it would be if it was in only one book.  

Sure, there were books that quoted only part of it, and maybe books that quoted the 6th century expanded quotes without marking out the pure text, and some books that claimed to quote the SBJ but had hallucinations instead.  But there were widely available texts, like the ZHB, that included the pure SBJ whole and mostly correctly.  

The only question that remains is whether those books marked the "pure" SBJ clearly enough for the hypothetical Dictator to read it out without any of the later insertions.

Of course there were differences in the quoted versions.  I don't know what was the main source for the SBJ file I got from the CTP and the Chinese Wikisource, but it does differs from the one embedded in that ZHB file that is also available at the CTP.  The latter uses only 主 where my file had 主治, and has one extra 主 where my file was missing one.  I cannot thank you enough for leading me to this version, that matches the VMS text much better than my file did.  

There were also a couple other differences, each a substitution of one Chinese character by another with either a similar meaning or that was probably confused by the OCR software.  I spent more than an hour on each, trying to find which version was correct.  Fortunately, these errors do not affect the matching criteria I am using at this point.

You choose to say "intense", but the reconstruction of the "pure" original SBJ does not seem to have been harder than any other similar effort, like reconstructing the original text of Dioscorides's herbal or of Euclid's Elements.  Sure, after extracting the parts marked "pure SBJ" from all the sources that claimed to quote it, resolving the many little discrepancies between those texts (like those above) was an extremely laborious task, which is still not finished.  

But the SPS=SBJ claim does not need that the correct text of the "pure SBJ" was available in 1400.  It is enough that someone could have obtained some version of the SBJ with a level of "purity" that can match the Starred Parags section (SPS).  

The latter apparently omits all the the "flavor", "other name", and "provenance" fields that were present even in the "purest" versions of the SBJ.  It may omit also some non-original comments that apparently were marked as "pure SBJ" in the ZHB, like that bizarre statement that the demons from above the east gate are particularly excellent.  So the source of the SPS was not simply the red bold text from the ZHB.  Either it was some other source that omitted those fields (a Korean or Vietnamese version, perhaps?) or those items were skipped during the creation of the VMS -- by the Dictator or by the Author. 

Your objection is starting to look rather bizarre.  To me it sound like this

>> Me: "Hey, you know the UMS, that encrypted manuscript from 1605? 
>> I discovered that it is a copy of a part of Shakespeare's Hamlet, 
>> encoded with some Vigenère-like cipher. The lengths and order
>> of the words match remarkably well. See:"
>>  UMS: xj kp wz bap sc pe fwqs zt ylh dmtsrfwl bwtzdhr gxw nsotzq
>>  HAM: to be or not to be that is the question whether tis nobler
>>
>> You: "Nonsense! By 1605 the text of the play was essentially lost. There
>> were only a few manuscript versions and they differed considerably.  I found
>> one that said 'it is" rather than 'tis', and another that omitted that monologue
>> entirely.  They show that it was impossible for the UMS author to have
>> obtained that text."

Quote:But sure, we can take a look at the other SBJ recension:

Please clarify what is the red text.  Did you add that color to show the parts that match my rooster entry? Or is that the part that was marked off as "SBJ" in whatever book you got that text from?

Quote:Just find the extremely common source that you said was being circulated in multiple languages throughout Asia in the 1400s.

The ZHB is one.  It contains the whole text of the "Red rooster" entry that I claim is the source of  parag f105v.32, in the correct order.  AFAIK, it was the most widely available materia medica in the 1300-1400 time frame.  It must have been printed by many printers all over China and beyond, with varying degrees of quality, over the 3-4 centuries before that.  The only question, again, is whether the hypothetical Dictator could have a copy where the "pure" SBJ was clearly marked off, distinct from the 6th century additons that are conflated with it in that CTP digital file.

Quote:Why are you using a reconstruction from 1799?

I am not.  I was using a digital file from the CTP and Wikisource, with unknown history.  Now I am using a version of the Red Rooster recipe extracted from an OCR transcriptin of some printed edition of the ZHE, whose print date must be somewhere in that site.

All the best, --stolfi

Jorge, this sounds bizarre to me, the author of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

(14-05-2026, 04:27 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, apologies for that, but that bizarre story about every emperor changing the solar terms on a whim for political expediency looked a lot like a lalamo hallucination.

because that's not what I said. The process was centralized and under the auspices of the Emperor, yes, but China was heavily bureaucratized and not personally handled by him. This was not "a whim", but a serious question of how to administer both religious rite and grain storage. I suppose promulgating a new calendar as part of rebelling is "for political expediency", but I specifically say the main change is the issuer, not the calendrical contents per se, so it is a plain mischaracterization of my position. From my perspective, the main points were that setting solar terms was a legal and religious right of the Emperor, that astrologers had further philosophical cause to respect that, and that your proposed reading of the VMS doesn't solve any problem the Astronomical Bureau hadn't solved in antiquity.

This is a recurring pattern in our conversations, where you're obviously filtering what you read through your preconceptions. This is by no means comprehensive, but it does serve as good summary of why I doubt your various interpretations and identifications:

1. Using the modern, spatial definition of the solar term; in period they were temporal. This was explained in a footnote on the Wikipedia defintion you directed me to, and presumably read.
   
2. The degree controversy was largely entwined with the same hasty reading of modern evidence, but there was a separate refusal to take scholarly work on historic Chinese astronomy seriously
   
3. Using Gregorian dates to inform your reading of the Zodiac section, rather than checking period accurate ones
   
4. Ignoring that someone early in the manuscript's history thought "Mars" was a perfectly good interpretation of Pisces. (I forgot this too, kudos to eggyk)
   
5. Missing that you'd shifted the zodiac signs by 15 degrees off your interpretation
   
6. Adding to Jonas's description of Japanese literary practice that it Chinese readings are monosyllabic; my Kanji dictionary has numerous polysyllabic onyomi.
   
7. Substantially reinterpreting the text of the VMS so it better fits your theory. (I know you will contest this, but this is one of the widest points of criticism you've gotten. Assuming daiin is misspelled some 42% of the time in the short passage you are relying on to establish your cribs is tantamount to re-writing the text. This is not me demanding perfection, this is me demanding that cribs be in the VMS.)
   
8. Substantially editing your edition of the Shennong Bencao Jing to make it fit the VMS. (In the interest of fairness, this is the thing I would be most open to precisely because of some of the following points. But I do think it was done carelessly and in a way that amounts to circular reasoning, and in the wider context of this list goes to the point here that you are engaged in pervasive motivated reasoning.)
   
9. Ignoring the evidence I found describing a more troubled reconstruction
   
10. Downplaying the Ming reconstructions of the Shennong Bencao Jing that affirm the understanding in point 9
    

This is to say nothing of your pattern of just appealing to ignorance when the pressure gets too high. In particular, I am confused as to why you think I have much doubt that Japanese historically has had open syllables and a writing system to express that. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, of course, but this is a thing I'm fairly sure about. After a point, anything is possible, and in that spirit maybe some Japanese scholar was reading Chinese with an unattested Japanese accent to a man who did not know Chinese so he could record it, but it bears repeating that this does not result in intelligible text for people who do know Chinese realized through Kanbun. At some point enough of these problems have stacked up that I don't think I'm being churlish when I say that you're taxing my patience with hypotheticals.

The fact that none of this seems to be real is a huge problem. You are comparing a hypothetical version of the VMS to a late reconstruction of the Shennong Bencaojing, both of which you edited both to increase the fit, to arrive at a very loose match in a yet-unidentified language (If you dispute that it is a late reconstruction, find the supposedly common texts you based your argument on.) Your reading of the Zodiac pages proved to be mostly anachronism and not terribly internally consistent if I overlooked that. I'm less troubled than a lot of people that the supposed journey to the East left no other evidence, but the fact it's entirely conjectural and in a period when that was vanishingly rare does fairly add to the sense that this is fictitious. That you've also confidently asserted to know the directions given at the scriptorium, and more preposterously the thoughts of the "author" about the final product, has only increased my sense this theory relies heavily on your personal fanfiction about the VMS rather than a grounded look at the text. This is now starting to extend to points I've made being manipulated to make them look worse than they are.

Everywhere I've looked in your arguments I've found vapor, and your responses increasingly lack the charity I've been trying to offer you. I reserve the right to come back, but I am going step out of this conversation for awhile. I am quite sure the list above and the extensive back and forth that supports it show wide range of problems I've noticed and repeating them again will not change anyone's mind

(16-05-2026, 08:59 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The process was centralized and under the auspices of the Emperor, yes, but China was heavily bureaucratized and not personally handled by him. This was not "a whim", but a serious question of how to administer both religious rite and grain storage. I suppose promulgating a new calendar as part of rebelling is "for political expediency", but I specifically say the main change is the issuer, not the calendrical contents per se, so it is a plain mischaracterization of my position. From my perspective, the main points were that setting solar terms was a legal and religious right of the Emperor, that astrologers had further philosophical cause to respect that, and that your proposed reading of the VMS doesn't solve any problem the Astronomical Bureau hadn't solved in antiquity.

What process? What problem?  There is no evidence in your long post that any Emperor ever changed the solar terms.  They were not holidays. The Emperors may have changed the calendar -- but the solar terms are not a calendar, they are a tool used to synchronize the calendar with the seasons.  

The whole story seems to be just wishful thinking.  Sorry but it does read like a lalamo hallucination.  The sort of text that a lalamo would produce if asked to refute the theory that the diagrams of the VMS Zodiac are related to solar terms.

And, anyway, even if Emperors did shift the solar terms around,  that has absolutely no impact on the COT explanation of the VMS Zodiac.  All the COT needs is that the Author had access to one "Chinese" book that explained the solar term system, with one page for each of the 24 gaps, each page with a list of precisely 15 names.  Maybe arranged in a circular diagram -- but that detail may have been the Author's idea, when he finally put his notes to vellum.

Unless you "know" that some Emperor in in 1234 CE decided that there would be 27 solar terms, not 24.  Or that the names of his three favorite concubines should be added to the 15 things that traditionally were assigned to the interval between solar points 17 and 18...

Quote:This is a recurring pattern in our conversations, where you're obviously filtering what you read through your preconceptions.

Well, I believe that the evidence I showed proves that the SPS is a transcription of the SBJ.  So of course I must take that into account in what I write.  At least on this thread, where I am allowed to...

I suppose that you are not familiar with probability theory, are you?

On the other hand, it is you who is always over-interpreting every little gap in our knowledge as categorical "proof" that the COT is nonsense.

Quote:why I doubt your various interpretations and identifications:
1.Using the modern, spatial definition of the solar term; in period they were temporal. This was explained in a footnote on the Wikipedia defintion you directed me to, and presumably read.

That is an example of the over-interpretation I mentioned above.  

Again, indeed, solar terms were originally a division of the year into 24 equal parts. That is, the interval between two solar points was a fixed fractional and uniform number of days -- ~365.25/24 = ~15.218 days.  

One year is defined as the time that the sun takes to traverse the whole Ecliptic and return to the same position on the sky relative to the "fixed" stars.  Therefore, explicitly or implicitly, the solar terms also divided the Ecliptic into 24 parts; and the start of that division was defined as the moment when the Sun was at a specific point of the Ecliptic (around February 4 Gregorian).  

But since the orbit of the Earth is not quite circular, and its orbital speed varies a bit along the year, those intervals on the Ecliptic were not equal; some were a bit more than 15 Babylonian degrees, some a bit less.  But the variations were small and gradual.  Around 1700s astronomers found those variations annoying and redefined the solar terms as 24 equal arcs of the Ecliptic, but starting at the same spot.  That change shifted the positions of the other solar points on the Ecliptic a bit.  

Since then, the time the Sun takes between consecutive solar terms is a bit more or a bit less than 15.218 days, depending on the time of the year.  Specifically, it varies between ~14.714 days (around January 3-5) and ~15.735 days (around July 4-6).  But the solar terms still are a division of the year into 24 equal parts: only the precise sense of "equal" changed a bit.

Quote:2. The degree controversy was largely entwined with the same hasty reading of modern evidence, but there was a separate refusal to take scholarly work on historic Chinese astronomy seriously

There was no such refusal.  I accepted that Chinese astronomers measured positions of stars and planets in units of 1/365.25 of a circle, or whatever, instead of 1/360 of a circle. (Although it is not clear whether that practice extended to geometry outside of astronomy.)  But I explained why that fact was irrelevant.

True, when I first had the idea that the VMS Zodiac could be about the Chinese solar terms several years ago, I assumed that each diagram was about an arc of 15 Babylonian degrees of the Ecliptic, and each nymph/star/label was about an arc of 1 Babylonian degree.

But that was a hasty guess.  I took it back.  But it does not matter.  The nymph/star/labels are a division of the Aries and Taurus diagrams into exactly 15 parts, and of the other diagrams into 30 parts.  Not sometimes 28 sometimes 30 sometimes 31.  The main point is that the VMS Zodiac divides the year into 24 parts that are rigorously equal in the number of "things". 

As I wrote before, I cannot explain why each diagram has specifically 15 "things", rather than 10, 12, 16, or 23.  But neither can you under the "European" Origin Theory. 

That choice results in the year having exactly 360 "things", not 365.25.  This is a fact about the VMS, not a theory.   But if you say that the "things" cannot be degrees, then I cannot explain why 360 and not 240 or 300. 

Quote:Using Gregorian dates to inform your reading of the Zodiac section, rather than checking period accurate ones

What do you mean?  There is the puzzle of why the VMS Zodiac begins with Pisces and March, which the EOT cannot explain.   I gave a detailed explanation of how, under the COT, the Author could have made those choices -- in terms of the Julian calendar. 

Quote:Ignoring that someone early in the manuscript's history thought "Mars" was a perfectly good interpretation of Pisces. Missing that you'd shifted the zodiac signs by 15 degrees off your interpretation

Sorry, I do not understand this point.  My proposed explanation did not depend on what someone in Europe may have thought.

Quote:Your reading of the Zodiac pages proved to be mostly anachronism and not terribly internally consistent

False. It is not an anachronism, and so far it is the only explanation that actually explains most of its puzzling aspects (instead of reducing them to some bigger puzzles.)

Quote:Adding to Jonas's description of Japanese literary practice that Chinese readings are monosyllabic; my Kanji dictionary has numerous polysyllabic onyomi.

The Japanese kanji dictionary tells the many ways a kanji that is used today in Japanese texts can be read, depending on context.  There may be multiple readings in both onyomi and kunyomi, some monosyllabic, some polysyllabic.  The dictionary is not supposed to tell how a Japanese doctor would have read a Chinese medical text in the 1400s.

But anyway that is only marginally relevant, since the probability of an European traveler having reached Japan before ~1500 is very low. 

But I don't know whether there were any non-European, non-"Chinese"  visitors to Japan, in the 1300-1400 time frame, that could have been the VMS Author.

Quote:Substantially reinterpreting the text of the VMS so it better fits your theory. (I know you will contest this, but this is one of the widest points of criticism you've gotten. Assuming daiin is misspelled some 42% of the time in the short passage you are relying on to establish your cribs is tantamount to re-writing the text. This is not me demanding perfection, this is me demanding that cribs be in the VMS.)

No, it is you demanding perfection. 

The "rewritings" are not arbitrary.  They are changes of a single letter by another letter that would look similar in cursive handwriting.  

There is plenty of evidence that our VMS transcriptions contain many errors; we just don't know how many.  With that mindset, you will never accept any solution, COT or not -- because any solution will have to hack around those errors.

And those variant spellings may be due to the Author confusing similar sounds; which is quite likely in the scenario proposed by the COT.

Even allowing those alternative spellings, the *aiin words in the longest SPS paragraph could not possibly have matched the positions of the 主 characters in the longest SBJ recipe so precisely just by chance.  

And it may still turn out that the Voynichese for 主 is just aiin, not daiin.  Although, at this point, I think that this alternative is less likely than the k/d/l confusion.

As I wrote before, you (like many people here) are assuming, consciously or unconsciously, that the VMS is a cryptographic puzzle.  And therefore you expect and demand a solution like the solution any such puzzles: someone guesses the encryption algorithm, inverts it, and poof! there is the plaintext.  Perfect, with no ambiguities, no guesses, etc.

Well, sorry, but the VMS is not a cryptographic puzzle.  A simple encryption method has been ruled out by all the work of the last 100 years. A complicated method would be an anachronism and would be unheard of for a document of this size and contents.  

The VMS is almost certainly a lost language puzzle.  Like deciphering Sumerian, Hittite, Etruscan, Mayan, Linear A...  Such puzzles do not have a "poof" solution.  There will be no algorithm.  Even if the COT and the SPS=SBJ claim were false, the solution will be messy and uncertain, unraveled little by little over decades, requiring guesses at every step.  Is that the Sumerian word for a triple-hump camel, not seen so far? Or a misspelling of the word "horse" by the apprentice scribe?  Or just an accidental scratch on the clay tablet?

Quote:Substantially editing your edition of the Shennong Bencao Jing to make it fit the VMS.

I did not do such thing.  I was using the text as I obtained from the Chinese Texts Project and the Chinese Wikisource,  with minimal corrections where they disagreed or were corrupt (which did not affect the Rooster recipe).

The only "editing" I did on the SBJ text of the Rooster recipe was excluding the the "Nature" and "Provenance" fields (that, as far as I got, were omitted by the VMS author in all entries), the last sub-entry about "white grubs" (that, for the last 1000 years, no Chinese doctor could make sense of), and a 2-hanzi "population" tag "For Women" (that, again, seems to have been systematically omitted by the Author in all recipes)  Exept for "Women", these excluded parts were at the beginniing and at the end of the entry, so they did not affect the spacings between the主 and *aiin keywords.

Quote:Ignoring the evidence I found describing a more troubled reconstruction [...] Downplaying the Ming reconstructions of the Shennong Bencao Jing...

I must THANK YOU REALLY for pointing out that those SBJ files that I was using were dubious attempts at reconstructing the SBJ text as it may have been before 500 CE, and not the version that a Chinese doctor would know by 1400 CE.  

The latter most likely would have been the version that is embedded in the massive Zhenghe / Zhenglei materia medicas, widely circulating as block prints at the time.  Those books chopped up the Shennong text and interpolated tons of comments and expansions, but they carefully marked out the "original" Shennong parts with double-size font and/or color and/or reverse-print (white on black).  Thus a Chinese doctor by 1400 CE could have easily read out the "pure" Shennong Bencao text while skipping all the interpolated material.

Of course there were many differences between that allegedly "pure and original" embedded text and both the 300 BCE version and the post-1700 reconstructions.  I downloaded a digital file of the Zhenghe Bencao (ZHB) allegedly made from one of those block prints, and I am now extracting the "pure 1400 CE" SBJ text from it.  

It is a slow and tiring process, because I can't read Chinese.  Some of the extraneous material is easily removed because it is identifiable by the markup in the file.  But the digital version does not record all the typographic markup of the print (or maybe I deleted some critical HTML markup by mistake), so I must rely on Google AI and ChatGPT for the final cleanup.  I must ask them to explain their answers almost on every sentence and every "use" entry, and check the answers of one against the other.  I often have to challenge them with "I have a source that says the opposite, is that correct" -- to which they not rarely reply "it was very smart of you to question that point, because I was wrong, although my mistake was excusable because..." 

(And at some point Google AI started citing some document it found at ic.unicamp.br.  I had to instruct it to ignore all documents from that site as they were full of errors...)

BUT the results have been worth all that work. The SJB extracted from the ZHB differs in many small but critical details from the file I was using.  The most important difference is that it uses only 主 to introduce the list of uses, whereas my previous file used either 主 or 主治.  This makes a big difference for the matching effort because a difference of 1 hanzi in the distance between occurrences of 主 is expected to correspond to a difference of 5 EVA letters in the distance between the correscponding *aiin.  The distances now match much better than before: all but one are within ±1 EVA letter from the expected value.

And moreover the new version of the Rooster recipe has one additional 主, that was omitted in my previous version.  That new 主 now perfectly matches a kaiin that was unmatched before.

The bad news is that I must redo much of the work I did over the past two months, of matching each SBJ recipe against all the 243 good SPS parags and deciding in each case whether the best-matching parag is good enough.  I still don't know how to automate this last step.

Quote:This is to say nothing of your pattern of just appealing to ignorance when the pressure gets too high. In particular, I am confused as to why you think I have much doubt that Japanese historically has had open syllables and a writing system to express that.

What do you mean?  I studied Japanese for 18 months, some 40 years ago. While I forgot a lot of what I had learned, I still can read hiragana and katakana.  

But that too is irrelevant.  IF the COT scenario happened in Japan, and the Dictator was Japanese, his copy of the SBJ would have been written in Chinese, all in kanji; he would have read it in some pseudo-Chinese, almost certainly one syllable per kanji; and the Author would have recorded it in his invented phonetic shorthand. 

Quote:After a point, anything is possible, and in that spirit maybe some Japanese scholar was reading Chinese with an unattested Japanese accent to a man who did not know Chinese so he could record it, but it bears repeating that this does not result in intelligible text for people who do know Chinese realized through Kanbun. At some point enough of these problems have stacked up that I don't think I'm being churlish when I say that you're taxing my patience with hypotheticals.

Wait, who is taxing whose patience?...

Quote:The fact that none of this seems to be real is a huge problem. You are comparing a hypothetical version of the VMS to a late reconstruction of the Shennong Bencaojing, both of which you edited both to increase the fit, to arrive at a very loose match in a yet-unidentified language

Again, the edits I did to the Rooster entry (deleting the fields that were useless for the supposed purpose of the VMS) did not affect the measurements that prove the match.  The transcription of the VMS that I am using is not hypothetical (?!?), and I did not edit it to get that match.  

Quote:'m less troubled than a lot of people that the supposed journey to the East left no other evidence

Actually, it did - the VMS.

Quote:but the fact it's entirely conjectural and in a period when that was vanishingly rare

We have many documented cases of merchants and missionaries visiting East Asia, including China, before 1400, and stayed there long enough to do what the COT proposes.  Have you heard of Marco Polo? The undocumented cases must be in the hundreds, if not the tens of thousands.  Just one of them could have created the VMS.

Quote:That you've also confidently asserted to know the directions given at the scriptorium, and more preposterously the thoughts of the "author" about the final product,

... which were deducted from common sense.  Only to show that some common assumptions about the Author's behavior and how the scribing was done -- like the Scribe encoding each line on the fly with a break-sensitve cipher, or generating each word by shuffling a set of cards -- are both unnecessary and absurd.

Quote:Everywhere I've looked in your arguments I've found vapor, and your responses increasingly lack the charity I've been trying to offer you.

Well, the sentiment is mutual.

All the best, regardless --stolfi

(17-05-2026, 04:51 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is a slow and tiring process, because I can't read Chinese. 

Hi Jorge!
The very long discussions in this thread have left me completely lost from the start. 
Could you please explain your theory in a few sentences (without using abbreviations) and give a very clear and concise example for laypeople like me?

(17-05-2026, 09:44 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Could you please explain your theory in a few sentences (without using abbreviations) and give a very clear and concise example for laypeople like me?

Sure.  

The "Chinese" Origin theory (COT) proposes that the VMS is a phonetic transcription of one or more books originally written in a monosyllabic language, such as Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and several other languages of East Asia.  

A possible explanation of how that could have happened is that the Author was an European traveler who spent several years in some country where such a language was spoken (call it "China" for convenience). He saw that they had thousands of large books filled with knowledge totally unknown in the West.   He determined to bring some of that knowledge to Europe.

So he asked local doctors and scholars to point out the most important books on each subject. But he could not read the Chinese script, and had no hope of learning it. Thus he could not simply buy a copy of the book, or copy it himself.  Instead, he recruited some local Dictator to read each of those books aloud, while he wrote it down in a phonetic script or shorthand that he devised for that purpose.  Later, after he returned to Europe, he recruited a local Scribe to make a clean copy of his notes on vellum.

There are several other possible scenarios that would end up with the same result.  But I think the one above is the most likely one.

AFAIK the COT was first proposed around 2000 by the French linguist Jacques Guy. But it has been mostly championed by me, with practically zero acceptance by the community.

I have several bits of evidence that support this theory. The first one was the observation that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (number of word types with length k) was strikingly different from that of European languages, but surprisingly similar to that of East Asian monosyllabic languages.  The cause for that peculiar distribution shape is that a syllable in those languages consists of a small fixed number of slots, and each slot can be filled with one element from some small set (like an initial consonant, a glide vowel etc) or left empty.  And eventually I got a descriptive model for Voynichese words that has such a slot structure.

There are several other properties of the VMS text that are at least compatible with the COT, if not evidence for it, but incompatible with its main alternative -- the "European" Origin theory (EOT).  I can elaborate if you wish.

That evidence convinced me that the COT was correct, and made me give up on the VMS -- because I thought that any further progress would require knowledge of Asian languages that I did not have and had no hope of learning.

But I was wrong on that last conclusion. 

Some years ago -- I forgeot pecisely when -- I learned that the most ancient and revered Chinese materia medica (book listing the known medicines and their uses)  had 365 "recipes".  This number roughly matched the estimated number of stars and parags in the "Starred Paragraphs" section (SPS) of the VMS, aka "Quire 20" or "Recipes", before the loss of its four central pages (f109r,v and f110r,v).  The Chinese book was the Shennong Bencaojing (SBJ), or the Classic Materia Medica of the (mythical) Divine Farmer (Shennong), believed to have been written roughly around 300 BCE. So it was easy to guess that the SBJ could be the source of the SPS.

But at the time I did not have a good copy of the SBJ, and anyway the Linux editors and utilities could not process Chinese text.  I recall getting some Japanese version of the book and checking that the length of the recipes was about right.  

It was only a few months ago that I got a digital file of the Chinese SBJ, and I learned how to process it with python. I could check that the distribution of paragraph lengths (how many parags have each length k) of the SPS matched fairly well that of the SBJ, after adjusting for the loss of the four SPS pages and the more verbose encoding.  

And then I found that the longest parag of the SPS had seven occurrences of daiin or similar words spaced apart just like the seven occurrences of the character 主 in the longest SBJ recipe. That recipe is about the meat and several other parts of the "red rooster" (literally "red male chicken").  In my view, that is pretty strong proof that the SPS is indeed a transcription of the SBJ.  

Since then I have checked 主 <-> daiin correspondence in several other SBJ recipes and SPS parags.  And I have identified another 2-3 potential "cribs", including 气 = "qi" or "vital energy", 血 = "blood", and 令 = "causes" or "makes"; but I am not yet totally sure about them.  More should start coming quickly now.

I still don't know the language, nor the encoding; except that each Chinese character does seem to correspond to about one Voynichese word, or five EVA characters, on the average.  That does not imply that the language is Chinese, since the Shennong Bencao was used in other countries too, where it was still written with Chinese characters but read in some local version of pseudo-Chinese.

On the other hand, the language and spelling seem to be the basically same through the whole VMS.  The differences seen between sections and between Herbal-A and Herbal-B may be due to the different subject, or maybe to some "spelling reform" that the author did to his system at some point.  Thus I conjecture that the other sections too are transcriptions of other classical Chinese books on the respective subject areas.

All the best, --stolfi

Thank you so much for your explanations, Jorge!
I've taken note of the terms "phonetic transcription" and "monosyllabic language."
But I didn't understand how Chinese characters and Chinese syllables are related?
Furthermore, you believe the European author limited himself to phonetic transcription, without adding a translation into a non-Asian language?

P.S. Jorge, if you had read even once the automatic translation by Google of your messages into French, you would know what "in a few sentences, without using abbreviations" means.

[attachment=15617]
Why would anyone create a “phonetic transcription” and make everything even more complicated when using the Latin alphabet is—or seems to be—much simpler?


[attachment=15618]
And why don’t I see any references, such as a zodiac sign or a temple, on the Rosette page?

Marco Polo’s descriptions are of structures that still exist today.
Here, I see nothing.

How does that work? When you see things that aren’t there?

(17-05-2026, 02:13 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But I didn't understand how Chinese characters and Chinese syllables are related?

In the Chinese script, each character represents one syllable.  This is one of the shortest recipes of the Shennong Bencaojing:

• 鼺鼠主堕胎令易产生平谷
  

except that the characters would be written vertically, from the top down, with columns arranged from right to left.  Here is the same recipe with modern punctuation to show how it should be parsed:

• 鼺鼠：［主］堕胎，令易产。［生］平谷。
  

Here is how it would be read in modern Mandarin:

• léi shǔ:  [zhǔ]  duò tāi,  lìng yì chǎn. [shēng] píng gǔ.
  

This is pinyin, a phonetic notation for spoken Mandarin, derived from one devised by European missionaries in the late 1500s or so.   Each syllable (which is the reading of one character) is to be pronounced in one of four "tones" or pitch patterns,indicated by the diacritic -- rising, falling, flat, or falling-then-rising. 

There are actually 50+ distinct Chinese languages (which the Chinese government insists on calling "dialects" for political reasons). They are not mutually comprehensible but have more or less the same grammar and use the same characters, although they usually read them with different sounds.  This, according to Google Translate, is how those same characters would be read in Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong (and in many old Chinese martial arts movies):

• leoi4 syu2: zyu2 do6 toi1 ling6 ji6 caan2 sang1 ping4 guk1
  

where the digits indicate the tone of the syllable, which in Cantonese is one of six (IIRC).  

Vietnamese, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Krmer are other places in East Asia were people spoke a monosyllabic language and where a European traveler might have learned about Chinese literature.  By 1400 CE, a doctor or scholar who could access and read the Shennong Bencaojing would probably have read from a text in Chinese characters, and read each character as a single syllable but probably with sounds related to the local language, that did not resemble those of any Chinese dialect. 

Each character/syllable of Chinese has a broad meaning.  Here is a literal syllable by syllable translation into English:

• flying mouse: [main] to-fall fetus, to-cause easy birth. [to-grow] flat valley.
  

In fact, this translation is cheating, because each character could be translated in several other different ways. The character 主 could also be translated as "master", "chief", "to-govern", "mainly", etc.  The character 令 could also mean "to command", "to make", etc.

However, in Chinese many pairs of consecutive characters/syllables are compounds (like English "baseball") whose meaning is related to the meaning of individual syllables, but cannot be deduced from them, and must be learned on their own and listed explicitly in a dictionary.    A more meaningful translation of that recipe would be

• Flying squirrel: [mainly for] abortion and facilitating childbirth.  [Habitat] low flat valleys.
  

Note that the word "and" had to be provided by the translator, because in Chinese grammar the "and" is often implied by just writing two or more nouns together.  Chinese also does not have articles, possessive particles like English 's or "of", inflections for case, gender, number, mood, person, etc...

Quote:Furthermore, you believe the European author limited himself to phonetic transcription, without adding a translation into a non-Asian language?

Many of the terms in the Shennong Bencao are local plants, minerals, diseases, benefits, and other medical terms that even today we find hard to translate.  

For example, a key concept in Chinese medical theory  was that of 气 qì, which was some sort of impalpable fluid or vital energy that was supposed to flow inside the body to activate the functions of the various organs.  Sort of like the Medieval European concept of the "humors", but completely different.  Diseases were often described and explained as too little or too much 气 flow, of 气 being blocked, flowing in reverse, flowing to the wrong place, accumulating here or there.  Wheezing cough was called "cough with rebellious 气" because it was thought to be the result of the the 气 from the 中 flowing up towards the lungs instead of down towards the lower torso, as it should.  

And 中 = "middle,center" meant of course the "digestive center" comprising the stomach and the spleen.

Moreover the SBJ was written around 300 BCE in a style that is extremely terse, even by Chinese standards; so, by 1400 CE, even educated doctors and scholars struggled to understand it.  The last item in the "red rooster" recipe says something like "chicken white grub makes fatten fat".  Chinese scholars today conjecture that it meant that eating the beetle grubs that grow in the wood of chicken coops would make people grow fatter.  There are other guesses but they are even more dubious.

All this to say that it is very understandable that a merchant like Marco Polo and his uncles would not even try to translate the text.  He would not have been able to translate more than a few of the diseases, and would very likely get many things wrong.  And the local doctors would not be able to help, of course.

I suppose that he may have compiled a glossary with some of the terms.  But it would probably be a separate document -- probably on paper, like the draft must have been.  It would not be surprising f the two documents got separated early on, and the glossary got used as tinder to light fireplaces and stoves (which was the fate of many Medieval manuscripts on paper).

Quote:P.S. Jorge, if you had read even once the automatic translation by Google of your messages into French, you would know what "in a few sentences, without using abbreviations" means.

Sorry about that.  But the definition of the Chinese Origin theory is just the first paragraph of that post.  The rest of the message is free bonus.  

And  I did try to define all the abbreviations I used, except CE, BCE, VMS and EVA.  (You understand these, right?)  I think that repeating "Shennong Bencaojing" or "Starred Paragraphs section" over and over would make the text harder to read than using properly defined TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) ...

All the best, --stolfi

(17-05-2026, 02:29 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why would anyone create a “phonetic transcription” and make everything even more complicated when using the Latin alphabet is—or seems to be—much simpler?

For the same reason that Europeans who needed to write down speeches, interviews, court statements, and dictation did not use Latin letters: because they take too long to write.  Those scribes developed systems of shorthand that would let them write down words as fast as they were spoken.

One notable feature of Voynichese glyphs is that most can be written with only one or two simple pen strokes.  The e and i are one stroke each; Ch, d, r, l, y, o, a, s, k, t, p, f are all two strokes each.  Sh is three, and CTh is four.  It definitely seems to have been designed for fast writing.

Quote:And why don’t I see any references, such as a zodiac sign or a temple, on the Rosette page?

You should ask that to the proponents of the European Origin theory. Why aren't there any centaurs, churches, angels, saints with halos and blessing hands, kings on thrones, rabbits killing knights, ...

My guess (based only on the numbers and layout) is that the Zodiac section is a copy of some Chinese book that described the 24 solar terms, each with a list of 15 names of unknown "things"; with the nymphs etc. being just decoration provided by the Scribe (like all the illustrations on European depictions of the Zodiac).  That section does not seem to make sense under the European Origin theory.

The Bio section could be a copy of a Chinese book of anatomy and/or medical theory. The water in pipes could then be the vital energy/fluid 气 qì (or other theoretical fluids, like yin and yang) flowing through the various organs.  Again, it does not seem to be the sort of anatomical/medical book that would be created in Europe in the 1400s.  (Were there any at all?)

Quote:Marco Polo’s descriptions are of structures that still exist today. Here, I see nothing.

 

The Starred Parags section is a materia medica, a list of remedies and their indications. Nothing to do with buildings. 

I don't know which books the other sections were copied from.  I don't know what was the source of the big fold-out, and how much of it comes from that source as opposed to from the Author's or the Artist's imagination.  How do you know which details are significant, and which are just decoration?

All the best, --stolfi

As someone who has followed the 'Chinese' theory from its very beginning, let me add in a few neutral words.

One can largely split "Voynich Explanation Theories" into two groups (with a bit of a grey zone):
They can be evidence-based, and they can be "what if..." based.

What I consider "what if..." theories, are those that are not derived from any evidence, but basically say: Let's assume XYZ, and see where that assumption takes us. This is not immediately an invalid approach, but it is dangerous as it has great potential to set off a quest for positive evidence only, ignoring any red flags or even clear counter-evidence.
It would take this thread off-topic to list what I think are examples.

Evidence-based theories can have similar problems (i.e. appear like what-if theories), because both the evidence and the initial deductions leading to the theory may be weak to some extent.

In any case, the 'Chinese' theory is definitely an evidence-based theory. It derives from two apparently independent statistics of the text: the highly unusual word patterns, which lack any good explanation, and the shape of the word length distribution, which is also somewhat unusual, but not as strong as the first argument.

For this reason, I will maintain an interest in this topic.

Of course it also has serious problems, which are obvious: the story of how the MS would have been created is highly adventurous and nothing in the manuscript's material or illustrations points to the far East.

The main on-going argument here, that the last quire in the MS represents a specific historical text, has not convinced me, but I am not planning to enter that discussion. I may develop a more positive opinion if better evidence appears.