The Voynich Ninja

Hello everyone, I am a new member here. I am Chenxiang, a student from China. Since I was born and raised in China, I might have a slightly better understanding of Chinese languages compared to foreigners?

It seems you are discussing something related to recipes or plants? A friend of mine comes from a family that has practiced Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for three generations, so they deal with medicinal herbs a lot. I have picked up a bit of knowledge from being around them. Is there anything I can help with?

I might be a bit late in learning about and researching this manuscript. I initially chose to discuss it in Chinese forums, as that might be something I am better at. I am currently reading through your conversations page by page.

The general hypothesis you are discussing is: you think it might not be a cipher, but rather a European who traveled to China, listened to Chinese doctors reciting medicinal herbs, and then used his own invented alphabet to record the Chinese pronunciations as "dictation notes"? Is this what you mean? Did I understand that correctly?

(Yesterday, 07:21 AM)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The general hypothesis you are discussing is: you think it might not be a cipher, but rather a European who traveled to China, listened to Chinese doctors reciting medicinal herbs, and then used his own invented alphabet to record the Chinese pronunciations as "dictation notes"? Is this what you mean? Did I understand that correctly?

Yes  It is assumed that this is a recording of the subjective perception of the sounds of the Chinese language. 
You can also read You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to understand how this could have been implemented.

(Yesterday, 07:21 AM)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is there anything I can help with?

Hello Chenxiang! Thanks for the offer! I surely would welcome some help!  

I don't speak any Chinese.  I studied Japanese for about one year and learned a couple dozen hanzi, but that is not much help for this investigation.  Although the kind of help I need may be hard even for Chinese speakers...

Quote:The general hypothesis you are discussing is: you think it might not be a cipher, but rather a European who traveled to China, listened to Chinese doctors reciting medicinal herbs, and then used his own invented alphabet to record the Chinese pronunciations as "dictation notes"? Is this what you mean? Did I understand that correctly?

Yes, but there is more.  The main hypothesis now is that the last section of the Voynich Manuscript (VMS), the "Starred Paragraphs"section (SPS) is a transcription of the Shennong Bencao Jing (SBJ), read mostly hanzi by hanzi in some currently unidentified monosyllabic language and written down in an alphabet and spelling that the VMS Author devised for that purpose.  

The evidence for that claim includes a good match between the lengths of the SBJ recipes and the parags of the SPS, but mostly the occurrence of certain key words in some SPS parags at positions that match corresponding key characters in certain recipes of the SBJ.  Like, a daiin often occurring where a 主 occurs.

I now consider the SPS = SBJ claim proved.  The Dictation story is only my best guess as to how it could have come about.

To be more precise, the claim is that the SPS is a transcription of the SBJ as it was quoted in large white-on-black characters in printed editions of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that were available around 1400 CE, wherever the Author was.  

I will later describe in more detail what I am doing and what are the hurdles I have.

All the best, --stolfi

(Yesterday, 06:45 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-09-2026, 09:04 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The other thing I'm going to want to know is what the badness cutoff is---when is that badness too high to count as a match?

Since the scale of the badness score is somewhat arbitrary, there is no cutoff.  I currently use the score only to rank the candidate parags.

Here is part of the report for the SBJ recipe for 粟米 = "foxtail millet".   The full entry is

  粟米：［味］苦，微寒。无毒。［主］养肾气，去胃脾中热，益气。
  陈者：［味］苦。［主］胃热，消渴，利小便。

The punctuation is a modern addition; the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (ZHB) as available in 1400 had no punctuation, so the text as the Author would get it is

  粟米味苦微寒无毒主养肾气去胃脾中热益气陈者味苦主胃热消渴利小便

This entry, atypically, has no "Provenance" field.  After deleting the systematic omissions (味苦微寒 and 味苦) only 25 hanzi remain:

  粟米无毒主养肾气去胃脾中热益气陈者主胃热消渴利小便

Given the average of ~5 EVA letters per hanzi, the corresponding SPS entry is expected to have ~5 x 25 = ~125 letters.   The program was asked to check the occurrence of four "cribs" which I am currently fairly certain about: 主, 气, 气, 主, in that order.  The "canoncal" Voynichese translations should be 主 → daiin and 气 → chedy; but the program will accept some variations like kaiin and cheda,with penalties in the score.  

My program considers only the 243 parags of the SPS that have a single star.  The others are assumed to be two or more parags mashed together by the Scribe, and therefore not suitable for this analysis.

Here is the relevant part of the output:

      243 parags read
      243 were evaluated.
      46 were rejected for having less than 111 letters.
      126 were rejected for having more than 150 letters.
      71 were examined for the requested cribs
      66 had all the cribs -- sizes 114..150
      64 parags had badness 99.0 or less.

To save time, my program rejected right away any SPS parag whose size was too far form that expected size, which left 71 parags.  Of these, 5 were rejected because they did not have the requested cribs nor any of the currently allowed variations thereof.
     
          <b2.6.122> (t1a1)  25
               4 　 粟米无毒
            1  2 主 养肾
            1  6 气 去胃脾中热益
            1  2 气 陈者
            1  7 主 胃热消渴利小便
   
This is the trimmed SBJ entry above, split at the requested keywords.  The second  column is the counts of hanzis before, between, and after the keywords 

Here is the best (minimum-score) match that the program found:   
   
      <f107v.20>  (q0r0)     0.443 = 0.300+0.143    135(+0)    5.400 e/h

                   18(-3)    0.052 palaroraiinkalkalo
      kaiin 0.150  12(+1)    0.034 chpalcheodyp
      chedy 0.000  34(+1)    0.012 pcholkalopalkaiintaiinolkaiincholk
      chedy 0.000  10(+0)    0.000 kolainaiin
      kaiin 0.150  41(+3)    0.046 okalotarotalaldaralololaiinolkalcholchdar
   
The best-scored parag was f107v.20, with badness 0.443.  The program did not find the two expected daiin at the right places, but it found two kaiin, which caused 2 x 0.150 = 0.300 to be added to the score; but found the two expected chedy.

The note (q0r0) indicates that occurrences of qo were deleted from the parag, and the strings ir, is, and m were expanded to iin, as discussed in previous posts.  After these adjustments, this parag had 135 EVA letters For this parag the program assumed an average of 5.4 EVA letters per hanzi.  With that ratio, the expected sizes of the gaps were 21.6, 10.8, 32.4, 10.8, and 37.8, rounded to 21..22, 10..11, 32..33, 10..11, and 37..38.  The actual sizes of the gaps were 18, 12, 34, 10, and 41, giving errors of -3,+1,+1,0,+3 EVA letters, which correspond to less than 0.56 hanzi.  These errors contributed 0.143 points to the score.

The second-best match was 
   
      <f116r.4>  (q0r0)      1.512 = 0.350+1.162    150(+13)  5.449 e/h

                   17(-4)    0.097 padarsheyosheekyl
      laiin 0.160  12(+1)    0.034 chckhyokaiin
      chedy 0.000  34(+1)    0.012 oteedytararalarydainsheedkchdyotal
      chedy 0.000  14(+3)    0.258 lkainoteedyoto
      raiin 0.190  53(+14)   0.761 otylolrololysainollchedychedyoteychedy?lainotedyoteey

Note that the score is 1.512, of which 0.350 comes from using alternate "spellings" laiin and raiin for 主, and 1.162 comes from the errors in the gap lengths; especially the "tail" gap, that is 14 letters longer than predicted. 

(This parag is also 150 letters long, which would be 6.000 EVA letters per hanzi.  The program considered that value too large and used the ratio 5.449 instead when evaluating the gap errors.  But even if it had used 6.000 the last gap would still be too long and would have given this parag a bad score.) 

Thus I think that f107v.20 is probably the translation of the Foxtail millet entry, and there are no other plausible candidates.

Here is the graphical rendition of the match for that parag:
[attachment=17668]
All the best, --stolfi

Okay, I will check the content of the linked thread you provided. However, as I am a complete beginner to this manuscript, it might take me some time to think about and understand it.

Also, I have never used a forum-like website before, so please forgive me if I make formatting mistakes with replies and quotes, or if I don't know how to properly quote someone's conversation. I am learning.

Just to mention, this might be off-topic, but Chinese has many different dialects, like Cantonese, Minnan, and Mandarin. If a European traveler were recording what they heard, they might pick up a specific dialect rather than standard Mandarin. Also, Chinese is a tonal language, which is hard for Europeans to catch. But if they were listening to a doctor from a particular region, maybe they’d try their best to note down the pronunciation. This is just my thought as a student. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Thanks.

Dear Professor Stolfi,

Thank you for your reply and explanation. If I understand correctly, you are now not merely proposing the “Chinese theory”; rather, you believe that SPS is a verbatim transcription of the Shennong Bencao Jing (SBJ) as quoted in the c. 1400 printed ZHB, and that the oral-dictation story is only your best guess as to how it happened. Is that right?

No problem, Professor Stolfi. I will do my best. I have studied Classical Chinese, and I have some understanding of and ability to analyze texts written by ancient Chinese people. In the “Chinese Theory: Support and Opposition” section of the forum, there are now about 86 pages. I have only just started reading from the beginning, but I have seen some of your translations of Classical Chinese sentences and characters, and they are correct. This shows that you also have a good understanding of Chinese.

This is very exciting. I am willing to help, but my knowledge of Chinese medicine and philology is limited. To be truly useful, what kind of help do you need most? For example, checking Chinese texts, comparing specific passages, finding references, or something else?

If possible, could you give me one concrete alignment example: one passage from the Shennong Bencao Jing, the corresponding SPS paragraph, and how the symbols/words correspond? I would especially like to know: Is there a stable mapping from VMS symbols to Chinese sounds? Were the omission rules fixed before the comparison, or adjusted afterward?

I am not trying to challenge you; I just want to understand the evidence so that I can help.

Best regards,
Chenxiang

(Yesterday, 01:49 PM)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If possible, could you give me one concrete alignment example: one passage from the Shennong Bencao Jing, the corresponding SPS paragraph, and how the symbols/words correspond?

Stolfi mainly shows the recipe for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which corresponds to the latest You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. recipe.

(Yesterday, 01:37 PM)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just to mention, this might be off-topic, but Chinese has many different dialects, like Cantonese, Minnan, and Mandarin

It could also be Vietnamese...

(Yesterday, 01:49 PM)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would especially like to know: Is there a stable mapping from VMS symbols to Chinese sounds?

Well, I don’t see them. I tried to find at least some connection between the sound of the character and daiin. I see a strange pattern in the fact that daiin, kaiin, and laiin are the same character, but aiin is a different one.
Well, by the way, I’d object to the inconsistencies like kaiin and laiin. If he wrote this text from memory and, as I believe he should have, understood it, then he should have clearly distinguished the words and avoided any confusion. If, while reading the corresponding character, the dictator says laiin, our European will immediately understand: “Ah, well, this is probably the same as daiin. I’ll probably write it down as daiin". 
If he wrote these words differently, he probably believed they were different words, which could mean he didn’t understand what he was writing. I don’t think it will be easy to confuse a character that appears several times in one recipe.
Of course, I’m not denying (and I’ve demonstrated this myself) that phonetic transcription of a language can be full of errors, but in the case of Chinese theory, this can turn into a huge assumption…

(Yesterday, 11:08 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I now consider the SPS = SBJ claim proved.

Unless you have found a considerable amount of matching voynichese -> chinese pairs that correctly and consistently match across recipes, I don't understand how this can be claimed to be proven. And by considerable, I would mean both a substantial amount of consistent matches, and also the absence of non-matches.

The fact that you are posting results which include many recipes being rejected (for one reason or another) and are only fairly certain about a few cribs, indicates that this is far from proven, even if what you have found so far is valid.

(Yesterday, 04:46 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(Yesterday, 11:08 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I now consider the SPS = SBJ claim proved.

Unless you have found a considerable amount of matching voynichese -> chinese pairs that correctly and consistently match across recipes, I don't understand how this can be claimed to be proven.

*I* consider it proven.  In my estimation, the probability that the matches I have seen (or even just that of the Rooster recipe) are just chance coincidences is negligible. 

But I understand that few, if any, will agree.  I am working on that.

All the best, --stolfi