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+--- Thread: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against (/thread-4746.html)
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - tavie - 15-11-2025
(10-11-2025, 07:19 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Since I am convinced that you have in-depth information and background knowledge on this, are there any sources or threads here? If I am convinced, I can finally give up my laborious work...
There wasn't a home for the 'Chinese' Theory...until now. I've agreed with Jorge and dashstofsk that this thread - previously known as "It's not Chinese" - can become the new home for it. I've shifted a few posts on it over from the LAAFU thread.
RE: It is not Chinese - Jorge_Stolfi - 15-11-2025
(25-06-2025, 11:47 PM)countingtls Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As someone who speaks not just one but several Chinese sub-groups (a dialect in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 閩/福建話 family, a dialect in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 客家話, and some Cantonese, and ofc, Mandarin), I can safely say that they are as far apart as any European language and mutually unintelligible to each other.
Back in the 2000s, for a brief time I entertained the idea that the sources of the VMS were from the land of the Bai people, who, as I read somewhere, were famous for their medical knowledge. Which "dialect" is spoken there?
(I still think that the big red glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are attempts by the Author to copy the book or author name of the original Chinese source, but upside-down. And a possible reading of those glyphs as upside-down Chinese characters seemed to be the name of a legendary author of a Bai medical text. Alas, while the Mandarin reading of those characters matched the sound, that name was written with different characters. Os something like that.)
Quote:However, the same texts can be spoken out loud in any of them without changing the written words. [...] They can see the exact same texts and just pronounce them as they like locally. (and within the proper Chinese dynasty regions as well, the dialects are as varied in the past and maybe even more)
Indeed. And then there are other monosyllabic languages in East Asia -- like Tibetan, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese -- that could also be Voynichese. By "Chinese Theory" I usually implicitly include these languages as well. One possible point in their favor is that they could have been visited by Europeans even while China itself was closed to foreigners.
Quote:This convenience even extended to ancient Japanese, Korean, and surrounding regions influenced by Chinese culture.
But Japanese and Korean are not monosyllabic, so they don't seem to match the morphology of Voynichese words. Unless the local medical/astrological/pharmaceutical language was not really Japanese or Korean, but mostly some bastardized Chinese-like language...
Quote:One historical event brought the spread of knowledge and crucially medical practices and physicians to the whole South Asia coastal region, even as far as the Middle East, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (known in the Chinese sources as 鄭和下西洋). Started in 1405 till 1433, with 7 voyages total. And part of the fleets travelled as far as the Mamluk Sultanate (most believe started from the 5th voyage in 1416)
Thanks, that is another plausible variant of the "Chinese Theory": that instead of the European Author going to "China", China (proper) came to the Author...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: It is not Chinese - rikforto - 15-11-2025
(15-11-2025, 06:44 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:However, the same texts can be spoken out loud in any of them without changing the written words. [...] They can see the exact same texts and just pronounce them as they like locally. (and within the proper Chinese dynasty regions as well, the dialects are as varied in the past and maybe even more)
Quote:This convenience even extended to ancient Japanese, Korean, and surrounding regions influenced by Chinese culture.
But Japanese and Korean are not monosyllabic, so they don't seem to match the morphology of Voynichese words. Unless the local medical/astrological/pharmaceutical language was not really Japanese or Korean, but mostly some bastardized Chinese-like language...
It was perfectly ordinary for someone to learn the vernacular readings of the Chinese characters, but be fluent in writing Literary Chinese. The vernacular readings extended to places that adopted the characters---Japan, Vietnam, Manchuria, Vietnam, etc. The neat trick here is that you can write it down with one pronunciation and it is completely and totally legible to someone who has never even heard of your language so long as they have some way of reading Literary Chinese. (A longstanding problem was that this wreaked havoc on poetry, but those details aren't worth getting into until they are.) I'm going to illustrate this with The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was written by a Chinese speaker, but I am going to recover the readings in modern Korean. I'm just going to do the first five characters, to keep it brief.
話說天下大,
화열천하대,
hwa yeol cheon ha dae,
I want to stress, this would be a very common and natural thing for a Korean scholar in, say, 1420 to do---at least if you account for the 600 years of Korean sound changes I cannot be bothered to look up. Our scholar would not only understand this to be Chinese, but it does not make any sense as Korean; it is monosyllabic and it does not have inflections or the needed particles to make it grammatically Korean. He could also write a letter to Luo Guanzhong thinking in these readings, and Luo would not have any major clues that they did not share a system of reading the characters and be able to continue the correspondence readily. "Chinese with Korean phonology" (or Vietnamese or Japanese or Jurchen or...) would not be very surprising---well, after the shock of finding literary Chinese in a European manuscript!
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Rafal - 16-11-2025
Some argument against Chinese language would be some statistical analysis from Quimqu
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It looks like Voynich language is statistically quite different from Chinese.
Of course we are comparing there 2 different text and don't know if it is a matter of language or content.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 16-11-2025
(16-11-2025, 01:24 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Of course we are comparing there 2 different text and don't know if it is a matter of language or content.
Indeed, I suspect that these graph measures are determined much more about the contents (more precisely, the type of contents) than by the language. Note for example that Vietnamese plots next to Catalan; and the distance between the two Latin texts is almost three times the distance between English (Romeo and Juliet) and Vietnamese.
It would be nice to see the plots for (1) exactly the same text (say, the Bible) translated into several very different languages, and (2) non-overlaping subsets of those translations of the same text.
I will try to prepare some samples, give me some time...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Rafal - 17-11-2025
Quote:It would be nice to see the plots for (1) exactly the same text (say, the Bible)
I was going to suggest it to Quimqu myself. I will do it now.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - quimqu - 17-11-2025
(17-11-2025, 12:21 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:It would be nice to see the plots for (1) exactly the same text (say, the Bible)
I was going to suggest it to Quimqu myself. I will do it now.
It's being cooked in the oven
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 03-12-2025
A common objection to the Chinese Origin Theory (COT) is that there are no specifically oriental elements in the images. But what could those elements be?
In my version of the COT, the Author transcribed a few "Chinese" books that the locals had recommended as the most important ones in each subject -- medicine, pharmacy, and astronomy/astrology. He transcribed the text from dictation by a local reder, using an alphabet that he had devised for that purpose. He copied freehand the illustrations that he could, presumably omitting any details that he assumed were just decoration. Back in Europe, he or (more likely) a hired scribe copied his notes to vellum, creating BL MS 408.
So what could these "oriental" illustrations have been, and can we see them in the VMS?
- Drawings of organs and ducts: Unfortunately "Chinese" organs look pretty much like European ones. Even eyeballs are just as round. (But how common were such depictions in European books of the time? I vaguely recall a claim that they were taboo...)
- Astronomical diagrams: Those we see in the VMS don't look specifically oriental. But, if one ignores the decoration, they don't look European either...
- Zodiac diagrams: The nymphs and signs etc look European, but they are just decoration. Apart from them, it is hard to imagine what distinctively Oriental features there could be in a Zodiac diagram. Except maybe for starting the Zodiac with Pisces. And dividing the Zodiac into sectors of equal number of degrees, instead of months with variable number of days. And considering 24 sectors of 15 degrees instead of 12 of 30. But on the other hand, the assignment of a short name to each of the 360 degrees is not Oriental. Not European either, ok, but not Chinese. At least as far as I know. But I haven't looked into that.
- Pharma drawings: The jars are decorations, but, whether the COT is true or not, the drawings of plant parts must be just clean copies of the sketches in the Author's draft. People who tried to identify them as European herbs haven't had much success, but of course that does not mean that they are distinctively Chinese. They could be distinctively Sub-Saharan, or distinctively Indian, or distinctively Australian, or distinctively Inuit...
- Herbal drawings: Again, just because the plants don't look like European plants, it does not mean they are distinctively Oriental. Some of the plants have absurd details, like telescoping roots and converging branches; but they would be equally absurd in China.
- Starred Parags: There are no images there, so there could not be distinctively Oriental features in there. Unless, maybe, if only there was a famous Chinese herbal pharmacopoeia with about the same number of paragraphs and a similar distribution of word counts per paragraph, perhaps...
And indeed it is strange that there is not even one glyph or weirdo in the VMS that looks even remotely like a Chinese character. Unless...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - rikforto - 03-12-2025
The Babylonian Zodiac weakly rules out the Sinosphere. Chinese astronomy divides the ecliptic by 28 mansions, which are linked to the moon. (There may be a crib here for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the adventurous, but again, the wrong Zodiac looms large here.) Vedic astrology uses the Babylonian Zodiac, which means some of the tonal and monosyllabic languages in the historically Theravada areas could conceivably narrow the search.
Checking some details for this post reminded me of something else: Pisces first is not so surprising. Well before 1400 CE, specifically around 100 BCE, the equinox precessed from Aires to Pisces. Placing Pisces first points to an interest in either or both direct stellar observation or Christianity; to the latter, The Age of Pisces is associated with Christ because of the approximate 0 CE changeover. Unfortunately for an Eastern link, Aires-first was maintained most places, albeit including Europe.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Rafal - 03-12-2025
Quote:A common objection to the Chinese Origin Theory (COT) is that there are no specifically oriental elements in the images. But what could those elements be?
Oh come on Jorge, are you trolling us?
Oriental paintings have people with oriental face features wearing oriental clothes:
![[Image: Huang-Shen-The-Cuju-Play-ca.-18th-centur...24x692.jpg]](https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Huang-Shen-The-Cuju-Play-ca.-18th-century.-Tianjin-Museum-China-1024x692.jpg)
And Voynich Manuscript has blonde ladies wearing European clothes. Okay, most often they are not wearing anything at all