The Voynich Ninja

(02-07-2026, 12:10 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Continuing the previous post: the main part of those pages is the "Chosen Match" section, which lists the SPS parag that seems to be the best match for the entry -- usually the one that got the lowest "badness score" while using the most cribs.  For that "bee larva" (BLAR) entry iy is 

SBJ entry parsing:

        <b1.4.100> (trim)  44
           2 　　 蜂子
        1 10 主　 风头除蛊毒补虚羸伤中
        2  0 久服
        1 12 令　 人光泽好颜色不老大黄蜂子
        1  8 主　 心腹胀满痛轻身益
        1  3 气　 土蜂子
        1  2 主　 痈肿
 
SPS entry parsing:
        <f114r.4>    0.833  237(+14)  0.350
                 13(+2)    0.044 fdeechdyopche
        daiin    58(+7)    0.250 ypchedyodalychedyqopcheokaiinshedypodaiinochedalloiinchedy
        qokaiin   0(+0)    0.000
        chdy     63(+2)    0.019 daiindchdoseedolchdolkchedychokaiinchdyqoeedyokchedydaiiinchedy
        daiin    40(+0)    0.000 ykeedyokeeedychedolchdaiinykardarycheold
        chedy    17(+1)    0.017 dkchsaiinchdedyqo
        daiin    15(+4)    0.153 okchedaiinchain

The top part is the SBJ entry, minus the standard omitted fields ([nature], [another name], [provenance]), divided into "hits" (the cribs used in the matching, bold) and "gaps" (the hanzi between those cribs).  The cribs are 主 = "mainly for" (3x), 久服 = "extended use", 令 = "makes", and 气 = "qi", sort of vital energy or essence.  The number 44 at the top is the length of the entry. The numbers in the following lines are the lengths of the "hits" (left column, bold) and and the following "gaps" (right column), all in hanzi.

The bottom part is the parag that seemed to be the best match.  IThe number 0.833 is the "badness score" of the match.  The second-best match (shown further up in the page) had a score of 5.032, which basically means "not a match".  The next number 237 is the length of the parag in EVA letters (so Ch and Sh count as 2, CTh as 3, etc). The "(+14)" means that 237 is 14 EVA letters longer than expected given the length of the SBJ recipe, which was 44 x 5.06 = 223 (rounded).  The 0.350 is the part of the badness score 0.833 that is due to imperfect matching of the hanzi and EVA cribs.

The following lines show the partition of the parag into "hits" and"gaps" that was assumed to correspond to the partition of the SBJ recipe. Thus the first 主 was matched to a substring "daiin" of the parag, the 久服 was matched to a "qokaiin", the 令 was matched to a "chdy", and so on.  The integers in the second column are the lengths of the gaps, with prediction errors in parentesis.  Thus the gap before the first matched "daiin" is 13 EVA letters, which is 3 letters more than the 2*5.06 = 10 letters expected given the 2 hanzi gap in the recipe before the first 主. This error is equivalent to 0.6 hanzi.  The 58(+7) means that the gap from that first "daiin" to the "qokaiin" is 57 EVA letters, which is 7 more than expected given the 10 hanzi between 主 and  久服.  And so on.  

The third column is the part of the badness score that is due to the errors in the gap lengths.  Each term is proportional to the square of the error; the first and last gaps have half the weight of the other gaps.  

The extra penalty term 0.350 listed on the head line is the sum of 0.300, because my current guess for the correct Voynichese translation of 令 is "cheody" or "cheydy", but the program found only a "chdy" at the right place; plus 0.050, because my current guess for the correct translation of  久服 is the pair "(q)okeedy.(q)okaiin", but the program found only a "qokaiin" at the right place.  

I am still trying to find more cribs, and figure out what is really the correct Voynichese translation of each crib,what are the most common "errors" in those strings, and what should be the penalties for imperfect matches.  Thus the penalties for imperfect matches may change, and that may change the results of the matching algorithm.  But in ths case the distance between f114r.4 and the second-best match is so large that it is unlikely to lose its title.

All the best, --stolfi

Jorge, why did you take the verbs out of the Chinese?

(03-07-2026, 06:23 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Jorge, why did you take the verbs out of the Chinese?

Those entries are exactly as they are quoted in the ZHB.  

If you mean the 主 vs 主治, indeed a couple of months ago was using an SBJ file from the Chinese Texts Project (CTP) that used  主治 as the "indications" keyword.  But the version quoted in the ZHB has just 主, which is what I am using now.  In fact, that is the main difference between the two versions -- and now the matches are generally much better.

Or maybe you are reading only the "gaps" column of that printout? In both the SBJ and the SPS parts, the text is both columns, "hits" (bold) and "gaps", interleaved.

(01-07-2026, 02:29 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....But Jorge is the one resting part of his argument on the idea that Chinese people are illiterate and just communicate in pictures .

 

Sorry, but I cannot continue this futile discussion.  You keep attributing to me absurd statements that I never made, like the one above.  And they are getting worse each time.

But let me try one last time to clarify what seems to be a major source of your confusion.  

A character like Z or 水 on a piece of paper has physical existence, and its identification as the "Z" character or the "水" character is essentially an objective fact.  Its meaning, in contrast, does not have physical existence: it exists only in the minds of people, and can be different for each person, and change with time, context, etc.  

Thus the claim that "the meaning of a Chinese character is a word" is not just wrong, but nonsensical: because there is no such thing as "the" meaning of the character 水.  

Back in 300 BCE, that character may have meant a word to the "Divine Farmer", in his spoken language.  But, by the time of the "dictation", that language had been lost for more than a thousand years, and no one knew what that word could have been.  Not even people who spoke languages that descended from it.   

And yet 水 continued to have meaningS to this day, not only to speakers of all Sinitic languages but also to speakers of Japanese, and to scholars reading old Korean and Vietnamese books.  Maybe to some of those people the meaning of 水 is a word -- but it will be a different word to different people, and none of those words is "THE" meaning of  水.  But to other people the meaning of 水 is not a word but the concept of water; and it so happens that, for most people who know that character, it indeed means the concept of water -- either directly, or indirectly through a word that means water to them.

So what would 水 have meant to a hypothetical Cantonese-speaking Dictator in 1400?  If to him 水 meant a word, it must have been the Cantonese syllable, that, in spoken Cantonese, evokes the concept of "water"  (Today it would be seoi2, but of course it would be something else by then.)  And water is what, in that scenario, the Author would have thought of when he heard that spoken syllable.  Or years later, when he read the phonetic transcription of that syllable in his notes.

Maybe the Dictator knew also the reading of 水 in Old (1400 CE)  Mandarin, and/or in some conventional "Classical" spoken language.  But, in that case, for him the meaning of 水 would not be one of those words, but the concept of water.  

But it does not matter.  The existence of those other readings, and whether the Dictator knew them or not, would have been entirely irrelevant to the "dictation scenario" or its likelihood.  When the Dictator saw 水 on the book, he would still have said the CANTONESE syllable for water.

(By the way, it seems possible that even in 300 BCE 水 may not have meant a word, but several words with different inflections, or several synonyms.  That is, even to the "Divine Farmer" the meaning of 水 may have been not a word but  the general concept of water.  AFAIK, there is no evidence that could rule out this possibility.)

(And that was probably the case much earlier, when the characters were invented for use on the oracle bones: as in Sumer and other places, writing must have been ideographic at first, with symbols denoting a few notable concepts rather than sounds.  The evolution must have been gradual from that to "lexographic" writing -- where symbols represent spoken words, and are strung out more or less according to the syntax of the spoken language to record sentences.)

All the best, in spite of everything --stolfi

(03-07-2026, 06:53 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But, by the time of the "dictation", that language had been lost for more than a thousand years, and no one knew what that word could have been.  Not even people who spoke languages that descended from it.   

And yet 水 continued to have meaningS to this day, not only to speakers of all Sinitic languages but also to speakers of Japanese, and to scholars reading old Korean and Vietnamese books.  Maybe to some of those people the meaning of 水 is a word -- but it will be a different word to different people, and none of those words is "THE" meaning of  水.  But to other people the meaning of 水 is not a word but the concept of water; and it so happens that, for most people who know that character, it indeed means the concept of water -- either directly, or indirectly through a word that means water to them.

You've made it very clear that I don't understand what is going on, so perhaps you could explain this a little slower. When were the readings lost? When were they recovered?

I see the verbs now. You should probably put on the pages where you are getting the text from to avoid this confusion. But yes, this is the robustness problem I have. If you're matching to texts with entirely different wording, it is probably because you're seive is not very discriminating.

(03-07-2026, 07:35 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.When were the readings lost? When were they recovered?

Weird question.  

Do you perchance believe that when people today read the Sun Tzu aloud in "Classical Chinese", they are uttering the same words that Sun Tzu would have?

Those words were lost gradually over the next 500-1000 years.  By 1400 CE no one knew how Sun Tzu himself would have read those characters.  Those readings were never recovered.  Linguists are trying to reconstruct them, but they still cannot even tell whether the language that Sun Tzu spoke had tones.

The syntax of that language was probably close to that of "Classical Chinese".  However, texts in "Classical Chinese" can usually be parsed and interpreted in many ways.  The commonly accepted parsing and interpretation of Sun Tzu's text are only what people have agreed are the most likely ones, based partly on semantics, partly on what people believe was the grammar of his language, and partly on tradition -- "that is how that sentence has 'always' been interpreted". 

The Hebrew text of Genesis I.1 is generally parsed and interpreted today as "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth."  But I have seen bona-fide scholars claim that the proper parsing is "When God began to create the Heavens and Earth, ...".   It may seem to be a pointless variation, but it has significant theological implications...

All the best, --stolfi

(04-07-2026, 06:43 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you perchance believe that when people today read the Sun Tzu aloud in "Classical Chinese", they are uttering the same words that Sun Tzu would have?

Let's focus on your position for a little bit. I strongly suspect we don't agree about what this question means, but at any rate, you feel you've had trouble getting your point across and I'm misrepresenting you, so let's focus on that before I answer this.

(04-07-2026, 06:43 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Those words were lost gradually over the next 500-1000 years.  By 1400 CE no one knew how Sun Tzu himself would have read those characters.  Those readings were never recovered.  Linguists are trying to reconstruct them, but they still cannot even tell whether the language that Sun Tzu spoke had tones.

Because, see, this is where I'm confused. You objected that it was "absurd" to suggest you held these people illiterate, but now you seem to hold that by 1400 CE no one could read Chinese anymore, and if I understand you, they still cannot. If they lost the words and were entirely dependent on interpreting the "pictures", that is a state of illiteracy. Indeed, your example You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is one where someone draws pictures and later aliens cannot read the words. I understand why being confronted with the plain implication of that is jarring  because it was meant to be, but if that is meant to illustrate how Chinese people relate to their written language (which would not be a language, as such), it is a description of illiteracy.

But maybe I'm the one being obtuse here, so perhaps an example could clarify what I'm asking about. What would you say is the first character (in printed order, not chronologically) from the rooster entry of the Shennong Bencao Jing that was lost as a word? What's the first character that was no longer known as a word in Classical Chinese by 1400? What was the great hurdle to the Dictator reading it?

(04-07-2026, 12:27 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-07-2026, 06:43 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Those words were lost gradually over the next 500-1000 years.  By 1400 CE no one knew how Sun Tzu himself would have read those characters.  Those readings were never recovered.  Linguists are trying to reconstruct them, but they still cannot even tell whether the language that Sun Tzu spoke had tones.

you seem to hold that by 1400 CE no one could read Chinese anymore, and if I understand you, they still cannot. If they lost the words and were entirely dependent on interpreting the "pictures", that is a state of illiteracy. ...

Again?

Quote:what you say is the first character (in printed order, not chronologically) from the rooster entry of the Shennong Bencao Jing that was lost as a word?

The language that the author of the Shennong Bencaojing spoke, like that of Sun Tzu, went extinct long before 1400 CE.  By then no one knew how those authors would have read those characters. Any of them.  Even today, the linguists have only guesses.  For the last 2000 years, when people read those "Classical Chinese" texts aloud, they have been using very different words.  Different words at different times, and even at different places.   Do you really believe that Sun Tzu would have read aloud his own writing as "Sūnzǐ yuē: bīng zhě, guó zhī dà shì..."?

There's no need for insults.

[Edit:  I see you have edited your post to remove them; thank you]

(04-07-2026, 03:23 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The language that the author of the Shennong Bencaojing spoke, like that of Sun Tzu, went extinct long before 1400 CE.  By then no one knew how those authors would have read those characters.  Even today, the linguists have only guesses.  For the last 2000 years, when people read those "Classical Chinese" texts aloud, they have been using very different words.  Different words at different times, and even at different places.

Again, the situation where someone goes through and simply makes up a new sentence with new words because they cannot read what was written down is illiteracy. In this description, Chinese people lost the words to Classical Chinese around the start of the Common Era, and from then on would not have had words to read or write Classical Chinese, despite this being the language of state for another 19 or so centuries.

Pardon the long quote, but it is really worth looking at what you said to explain this to me:

(25-06-2026, 04:23 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Suppose that Julius Caesar, during his stay in England, wanted to write that "the house of the king's soldier had a round window":

  domus militis regis fenestram rotundam habet.

But he had too much wine at lunch, so much tha he could not even remember the Latin letters. So he writes in ideograms:

    

Some 2500 years later, Martian archaeologists digging into the ruins of London find that wax tablet.  They can tell that it is some form of writing, but, due to their vastly different neurology and culture, cannot identify any of the objects depicted in those line drawings.  So they recruit one of the local Earthlings and ask him to read that inscription in English (a language which they had learned long ago, when their first radio-telescopes captured the radio broadcasts of War of the Worlds). 

So the Earthling reads

  house soldier king window ball hold

That is definitely not Latin, nor some hypothetical "Classical English".  It is a language with English vocabulary, so the Martians understand all those words, but the grammar is not English. The grammar is not Latin either, because it lacks the all-important Latin inflections that Caesar's "ideographic" writing did not record.  And some of the words used by the Earthling, like "ball", even though they are valid "readings" of the drawings, they are not the ones that Caesar intended.

Yet that dictated English reading would already give the Martians a good part of the meaning that Caesar intended to write down.

Back on Mars, the archaeologists would have to puzzle out whether that inscription is telling of a house-soldier grabbing an obese king through a window or whatever.   Eventually, if they managed to find a few hundred similar inscriptions, they may get a partial grasp of their peculiar grammar, and thus make better guesses about the meanings.

But that "broken English" reading is the best they could have obtained under those circumstances.  It increased their understanding of the inscription from zero to much more than zero.  An improvement of infinity percent...

Chinese writing is like Caesar drawing pictures drunk? It has no grammar? And the best reading that can be done of it today is a "broken" one? (And I am hoping you just got carried away by the analogy and do not mean to imply that Chinese people have different neurology from Europeans, though that has brought me up short every time I've read this passage.) This is a description of an artist who cannot express himself in words and an art critic who rightfully cannot piece together a sentence from it. That is a plain description of illiteracy! If you do not like the implications of that, well, I have been encouraging you to drop this formulation for some time