(05-06-2026, 10:56 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Like any other "language" theory about a manuscript, the Chinese theory has many assumptions and gaps. ... There are meaningful [proposed translations], but often the approach to them is subjective, and I haven't seen any general and trustworthy methodology yet
Actually, at the current stage the "Chinese" Origin theory (COT) it is rather unlike most other "language" theories. They generally propose a language and struggle to extract the plaintext. I know the plaintext, but still can't guess the language...
Quote:as far as I know, it is based on statistical similarities and the fact that "word repetition" occurs in many Asian languages. However, in my opinion, this is not enough to directly claim that Voynichese is a Chinese or Vietnamese language.
That is
not one of the arguments for the COT. On the contrary, it is one of the objections that people have raised: that the way words repeat (or not) in the VMS is (allegedly) unlike what happens in natural languages. I am writing a long response to that objection; stay tuned...
Quote:after a long time, we still haven't understood how the proposed transcription system used in the manuscript works.
We can't figure that out until we identify the language. There are more than 50 candidate languages that survived to this day, and maybe dozens more that went extinct in the last 600 years.
And even after we identify the language, we will not know how it was pronounced 600 years ago. We only know that all those languages changed a lot -- much more than what happened to English or other languages that have roughly phonetic scripts (because such a script serves as an "anchor" resisting language change).
Quote:If it were based on Chinese, we would expect to find more parallels, as it's unlikely that the author didn't try to simplify a language that wasn't similar to the European languages they were familiar with (it seems strange that the author's system would be as complex or even more complex than the Chinese language itself.
I don't understand this objection, sorry. In the main scenario of the COT, the Author did not invent the
language. The language was that of the Dictator who read the book aloud to him. He invented the
script to record its sounds.[/quote]
Quote:We must remember that this is the Middle Ages, the author is a European, and for him China was more, say, "exotic" than for us now).
That last part is quite wrong. If the Author lived for a couple of years in "China", as the COT proposes, he knew the language and other things "Chinese" vastly better than almost everyone on this forum.
In fact I am puzzled by how people seem to think that it was "impossible" for an European to have been in China in the 1400s and have learned the local language. As if they had not heard of Marco Polo.
Quote:why is this book incomprehensible to us? Why did the author, who wanted to write a work in transcribed Chinese that would be understandable to other readers
The Shennong Bencao is a materia medica -- a list of remedies and their indications -- about as old as Dioscorides's. Even modern Chinese scholars struggle to identify the remedies and diseases in it.
The Author surely did
not [edit] know 90% of the plants listed in it; and, unless he was a very competent doctor, would not have heard of most of the diseases.
So, how would the Author have produced a version that was understandable to Europeans? He could not read the Chinese characters. His "Chinese" friend did not speak any European language. He could not understand half the words. If he had to ask the Dictator or someone else to describe the symptoms of each disease (like 贲豚 -- not making that up) so that he could
maybe recognize it and write down the Latin name, it would take a month to translate a single page...
Quote:The fact that they did not use Latin can be explained by the fact that the merchants did not find a method of romanization.
You mean, the Author found the Roman
alphabet unsuitable. Yes; I suppose it was partly because the language had sounds that would have needed digraphs if written in Roman letters, partly because writing Roman letters would have been too slow for dictattion.
The latter is the reason for the existence of You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. (or "shorthand"; not to be confused with ste
ganograpy). Indeed, I suspect that Voynichese is more a shorthand notation, rather than a real phonetic alphabet.
Quote:Have you ever seen large, detailed maps on nine pages in regular diaries?), not explain how to read it? There is the Codex Cumanicus, where the Tatar language is listed at the beginning and written in a way that European missionaries could read and understand. This is the simplest and most practical approach, which we don't see in the manuscript.
Again, I don't understand this objection. Sure, there are many manuscripts in other languages that are quite different from the VMS. So?
Quote:and additional information about anatomy (the so-called "balneological" section).
All I can tell for sure is that
the Starred Parags section (SPS) is a transcription/translation of the Shennong Bencao. I don't know what is the nature or source of the other sections of the VMS. (Although, since the stript and language seem to be the same throughout the whole VMS, I guess that each of the other sections, too, is the transcription of some other classic Chinese book - a Herbal, a book on anatomy or clinical medicine, a book on astronomy, etc. But I will let these questions for others to investigate.)
Quote:The book does not contain any topic related to China.
Why do you say that? Because of the dresses and hairdos of the nymphs? They are obviously decoration, like the human figures in any European book on astrology or astronomy. And yes, they were drawn by an European Scribe, almost certainly in Europe, when the Author had his notes copied onto vellum.
Quote:Judging by the illustrations, the manuscript is mostly a medical reference book about plants, their medicinal properties.
Yes, that is exactly what the Shennong Bencao is.
Quote:However, there is one "but" - the f68r1 and f68r2 diagrams, which may depict the Chinese lunar month (simple and sacred, respectively). However, this coincidence alone is not enough...
This is new, I never though or heard of that idea. But I do think that the
Zodiac is based on the Chinese "solar terms" system, a division of the year in 24 equal parts. But this is only a guess, not yet proved.
Quote:the author's motive is unclear. ... Why would the author use an obscure transcription system to write a reference book that he (or other people) would have to use constantly?... if you say that it could have been the author's personal reference book, you'll have to explain to me why the author worked so hard on it?
It was not meant to be a reference book.
The Europeans most likely to be in "China" by that time were not doctors or scholars. I suppose we can exclude missionaries too, due to the nature of the decoration and absence of any Christian imagery (yes I know about the alleged "cross" in Bio -- I don't think it is original.)
Therefore, I mostly agree with you:
Quote:it could have been a group of merchants who regularly visited China and had a basic understanding of the Chinese language (which was sufficient for them to negotiate and establish contact with the Chinese), and who decided to write a book for a limited number of people (perhaps their colleagues who traveled to China, or perhaps someone else).
Indeed I imagine the Author as being most likely a somewhat educated merchant (like Marco Polo and his uncles). Like many others before and after him, he must have been impressed by the large number or large printed books that circulated there; including multi-volume treatises on all subjects. So his goal was just to bring some of that knowledge to Europe; and the VMS was the best he could do.
But I do not think that the Author would have been more than one person. The VMS was a somewhat crazy project, and it is unlikely that more than one in a hundred merchants would have chosen to undertake it.
And also he definitely did not "regularly" visit China. The trip must have taken one year or more, in each direction. Most likely he was there only once or twice, and stayed there for at least a few years.
Quote:I would like to hear why the system is like a cipher and contains its own internal features. If you try to convey Chinese as accurately as possible, but inconsistently, I don't think you will encounter any "anomalies" or peculiarities in the text.
Again, I don't understand the argument. Here is a quite accurate phonetic transcription of four recipes from the Shennong Bencao. In what sense this text has "no anomalies or peculiarities"?
yù quán zhǔ wǔ zàng bǎi bìng róu jīn qiáng gǔ ān hún pò
zhǎng jīr òu yì qì jiǔ fú nài hán shǔ bù jī kě bù lǎo shén
xiān rén lín sǐ fú wǔ jīn sǐ sān nián sè bù biàn
dān shā zhì shēn tǐ wǔ zàng bǎi bìng yǎng jīng shén ān hún
pò yì qì míng mù shā jīng mèi xié è guǐ jiǔ fú tōng shén
míng bù lǎo néng huà wéi gǒng
shuǐ yín zhǔ jiè sào jiā yáng bǎi tū shā pí fū zhōng chóng
shī duò tāi chú rè shā jīn yín tóng xī dú róng huà huán fù
wèi dān jiǔ fú shén xiān bù sǐ
kōng qīng zhǔ qīng máng ěr lóng míng mù lì jiǔ qiào tōng
xuè mài yǎng jīng shén jiǔ fú qīng shēn yán nián bù lǎo
néng huà tóng tiě qiān xī zuò jīn
Quote:You should explain how you differ from him. Cheshire selected roots from all European languages, deriving a meaningful result from them, but you know how correct his method is.
My claim is completely different from that. Whatever the language will turn out to be, it will be a single language -- that (at the time) was probably spoken by an entire nation. Not a pastiche of unattested dialects.
Quote:If the book was written not by merchants, but by hired scribes, it is possible that the merchants provided the scribes with texts in Chinese and explained how to write them, and the scribes, who did not know Chinese and did not understand what they were copying, translated the text without questioning what they were writing,
It would make no difference whether the book was written by merchants or scribes. If they were in "China", they would be just as likely to have basic fluency in the spoken language; and they would be equally unable to read Chinese characters (which is how the SBJ would have been available, even in countries that did not speak a Chinese language.
To be literate in Chinese, enough to read newspapers and other common text, one must learn several thousand hanzi (Chinese characters) and tens of thousands of compound terms that can be formed with them. That level of literacy is normally reached by the end of high school. A few Christian missionaries apparently got to that level with a few years of intense study, because it was absolutely essential to their mission. No way that merchants or scribes could have been taught enough hanzi to translate or transcribe a Chinese book on their own. Especially a book so difficult to read as the SBJ.
They would not even have been able to copy the hanzi. Imagine them trying to copy 囊, or to copy 戌 without conflating it with 戍...
Quote:and a large number of qo-
We do not know how tones were encoded, or even if they were encoded at all. My hunch is that the "circle" characters
a,
o,
y were used for that purpose, but not in the same way that diacritics or digits are used in modern phonetic writing.
qo may be part of the tone encoding (say, a variant of
o).
But I have a hunch that it is like our "&", a sign for "and"; and that it was added by the Author because he felt that the Chinese way of enumerating things -- without any "and" -- was too confusing. That is, when the Dictator read the original 青石赤石黄石白石黑石 as qīng shí chì shí huáng shí bái shí hēi shí ("blue stone red stone yellow stone white stone black stone") he would write "qīng shí
qochì shí
qohuáng shí
qobái shí
qohēi shí" in Voynichese. Which would make even more sense if he was an Arabic speaker...
Quote:In general, one can even say that balneology was not written by a very skilled person. This is consistent with the fact that there is always more text on the pages of the balneological section than on others, not taking into account the recipes that were written by the same person, and it is logical to assume that the scribe would be looking for a way to reduce his work.
I must insist that it is very unlikely that the Scribe who put ink
on the vellum was the Author himself -- for a number of reason. Independently of the COT or any other origin theory. This "scribing" most likely happened in Europe, by an European Scribe, copying from a draft that the Author had written on paper. The Scribe would have been taught the Voynichese alphabet by the Author, and trained it until the Author was satisfied. But there is evidence that the Scribe did not understand anything of the contents, and probably did not even know what each glyph sounded like.
Thus the analysis of the material, handwriting, layout, and purely decorative elements of the figures will not tell us anything about the Author, or the origin and nature of the contents.
Quote:[the theory] it still contains many inaccuracies, liberties, and assumptions.
Indeed there are many details that are just guesses, and surely many are wrong. For instance, the Author being an "European" traveler in "China" is only what I think is the most likely scenario for the COT. But, still within the COT, it could be that instead the Author was a "Chinese" in Europe who wanted to make his knowledge accessible to Europeans.
And the Voynichese translation of 主 may be just
aiin, not
daiin, but the
d almost always shows up before it due to some peculiarity of the language and/or of the script.
But, regardless, I believe that the basic claim "SPS ≈ SBJ" has enough evidence to be considered proved.
All the best, --stolfi
.