The Voynich Ninja - It is not Chinese

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

(14-06-2025, 03:36 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I found only one instance of "xiǎo'ér bǎi èrshí" (line 54 of the third section 《下卷》). The text you quoted seems to have been pasted several times (and lost the "x").

I'm not sure if we are talking about the same piece, but I don't think there are any obvious problems (e.g., pasting several times) with the transcription I posted. YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ is 藥一百二十, which I can read, it is medicine+one+hundred+two+ten and it visually appears at the very beginning of lines 1, 2 and 3 of the text (the introduction, as you called it). 藥 is the Traditional Chinese version of 药, which is one of the characters in the word "pharmacy", so it's used all over the place in many Asian countries.

(14-06-2025, 02:44 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."On the other hand", "either .. or", "if it's true... if it's not true". They should be blatantly obvious, once the text is transcribed. They exist in all languages I now, they certainly exist in Chinese. It doesn't look like they can be easily found in the Voynich Manuscript.

I don't know how common 4-word expressions like "on the other hand" are in old Chinese manuscripts. My impression is that those texts tend to be rather terse. But anyway the VMs has many 2-word expressions" that recur more often than expected, like qokedy otedy

Both that Chinese text and the VMS have many occurences of duplicated words like "mù mù" and "chuàng chuàng", qotedy qotedy and otaiin otaiin

The whole "Starred Parags" section has a distinctive structure, like a "bulleted list". Like the SBJ.

One of the diagrams has a circular text with a sequence of 17 symbols repeated 4 times (with some hiccups, which I would attribute to errors by the Scribe or by the conjectured Retracer).

(14-06-2025, 03:56 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure if we are talking about the same piece, but I don't think there are any obvious problems (e.g., pasting several times) with the transcription I posted. YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ is 藥一百二十, which I can read, it is medicine+one+hundred+two+ten and it visually appears at the very beginning of lines 1, 2 and 3 of the text (the introduction, as you called it). 藥 is the Traditional Chinese version of 药, which is one of the characters in the word "pharmacy", so it's used all over the place in many Asian countries.

Ah, yes, sorry. That part is in the introduction, and is saying that the original SBJ listed 120 ("one hundred two ten") harmless tonics, 120 remedies, and 125 ("one hundred two ten five") poisons. I did not search in the intro, and found only one "xiǎo'ér bǎi èrshí" way further down, in the phrase "used to treat 120 kinds of epilepsy ..."

But that webpage is the "expanded" version of the SBJ, written around 1400 CE. If the VMs Author copied the SBJ, it must have been the original version. Which apparently is now lost, and probably did not have that introduction...

Which, by the way, if true would make the VMs suddenly quite valuable to Chinese scholars. It would be like the re-discovery of the Book of Enoch in the Ge'ez Bible, or of the Zend Avesta among a small Zoroastrian community in India...

(14-06-2025, 09:21 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the weirdest things I did in my life was sitting for a couple of hours in a dusky library room in Prague, while outside the sun shone on countless touristic opportunities, copying by hand the biography of Jacobus Sinapius/Horcicki/Tepenecz from a hefty History of the Jesuits in Bohemia.

The touristic opportunities were not completely missed.

Yes...

At first, I thought Chinese was just an example to explain something.
But the sheer volume of explanations surprised me a little.
Now I think you really mean it. Chinese?
Just to make it understandable to another person, he needs a two-year language trip.
People my age know that all you need to solve a puzzle is toilet paper and a raw egg.
Problem no. 1: people just don't look properly.

(14-06-2025, 04:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know how common 4-word expressions like "on the other hand" are in old Chinese manuscripts. My impression is that those texts tend to be rather terse. But anyway the VMs has many 2-word expressions" that recur more often than expected, like qokedy otedy

Both that Chinese text and the VMS have many occurences of duplicated words like "mù mù" and "chuàng chuàng", qotedy qotedy and otaiin otaiin

The whole "Starred Parags" section has a distinctive structure, like a "bulleted list". Like the SBJ.

One of the diagrams has a circular text with a sequence of 17 symbols repeated 4 times (with some hiccups, which I would attribute to errors by the Scribe or by the conjectured Retracer).

Quote:YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ is 藥一百二十,

This is interesting in a way. It is similar to modern Mandarin, but it is not the same.
1) 'Wrong' word order
2) No classifier word

Could this be because of changes in the language since 1400, or because this is not Mandarin in the first place?

(Yesterday, 12:24 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ is 藥一百二十,

This is interesting in a way. It is similar to modern Mandarin, but it is not the same.
1) 'Wrong' word order
2) No classifier word

Could this be because of changes in the language since 1400, or because this is not Mandarin in the first place?

I think the word order looks weird, but also these are not complete phrases, only the repeating parts. The phrases look like this:
上藥一百二十種為君...
中藥一百二十種為臣...

As for the classifiers, I once read a popular-level book about the evolution of the Chinese language from its classical to its modern form, and it went something like this:
1) Classical Chinese had very complex syllables with many different finals (-k, -t, -m, etc.) and each word was truly a single distinct syllable. Also, the reliance on the tones was not as big as it is now.
2) As different dialects of Chinese grew apart, the most variance was in the finals, so the syllable initials and the vowel were largely the same, but the finals would differ between dialects and many finals would become nulls, different in different dialects.
3) When the final consonant became silent, in many cases its effect on the preceding vowel remained, which produced much of the tonal difference. Like in English you pronounce "bat" with a higher pitched vowel than "bad", so if English dropped the final consonant, you would end up with ba1 for the animal and ba3 for the adjective (but also for words like ban, bash), using the Chinese tone notation.
4) When people with different dialects had to communicate with one another, they needed to clarify each word to make their speech mutually intelligible. So, when the other person didn't understand your syllable for "rice" you would say "rice food" or "white rice", in the hopes that the meaning would become unambiguous.
5) And this gave rise to the modern classifiers and multi syllable words and heavy reliance on tones.

But I have to say it again, this was not a technical book, so this account can be in part folk science and folk etymology.

(14-06-2025, 06:02 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At first, I thought Chinese was just an example to explain something.
But the sheer volume of explanations surprised me a little.
Now I think you really mean it. Chinese?
Just to make it understandable to another person, he needs a two-year language trip.

Yes, I do mean it. But, again, not "Chinese" specifically, but any language whose "words" are mostly single syllables with a nontrivial structure. Like the Chinese languages, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Burmese...

No cryptographic code is as hard to crack as a natural language, if you don't know it or any close relative. See the use of Navajo speakers by the US in WWII.

Hittite was deciphered only after and because it was recognized as an Indo-European language.
Linear B, used by the Myceneans ~1450, was deciphered when recognized as an old form of Greek.
Linear A, used by the Minoans 1800-1450 BCE, is still undeciphered.
Meroitic, used by the Egyptian neighbors to the South (who stole the head of Augustus and built some OK Very Nice But Cannot Call Them Great pyramids) is still largely undeciphered (but it was recently found to be related to other African languages, which promises progress).
Proto-Elamite is still undeciphered.
Etruscan is still mostly undeciphered; even though script can be read, we don't know the meaning of most words. (Until recently Etruscologists knew the words for "six" and "four", but did not know which was which. This riddle has been solved by studying the arrangement of numbers 1-6 in Etruscan playing dice. That should show how bad things still are.)
The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics could have happened 100 years earlier if Kircher had not declared them to be ideographic.
The Mayan writing idem 50 idem J. Eric Thompson idem idem.

The last two examples show how decipherment can been delayed by centuries because of "obvious" but wrong assumptions about the language or the nature of the script...

(Yesterday, 09:10 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think the word order looks weird, but also these are not complete phrases, only the repeating parts. The phrases look like this:
上藥一百二十種為君...
中藥一百二十種為臣...

I wanted to highlight some issues with the general idea of detecting an East-Asian language in the MS.
Word order differs between languages just like it does between say French and English.

(I once posted about chicken soup and soup chicken).

Many (most?) Asian languages use classifier words, but I have no idea about temporal and regional variations.

I don't think that the above answers either of my two points, but I am not sure.

Your reference to a somewhat doubtful source is only too well appreciated. Yes, I have also read that tones gradually evolved from other more subtle differences in pronunciation, but good sources are hard to find online (at least in languages I can read), and I have my personal pet peeve against the refusal of using years or centuries.

Why can we only read about things happening in this or that dynasty??
This almost feels like a conspiracy...

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8