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+--- Thread: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against (/thread-4746.html)
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - rikforto - 04-12-2025
The problem isn't that I find this completely implausible; I will, in fine Voynich tradition, concede a great many things are possible. But once you set aside the---admittedly intriguing---linguistic evidence, there isn't much in the zodiac section to hang your hat on. Is there an attested Chinese tradition of representing the 24 solar terms with abstract circular diagrams? Does that tradition link them to the somewhat uncommon 12 zodiac sign divisions of the ecliptic? (Alternatively, can we link these pages to relevant divinatory traditions?) Would the Ming literati have considered this tradition among their most important, in line with the way you present the VMS scribe asking for the most important books? Without these links, I don't see what distinguishes this from a great many other things I've conceded are possible about this manuscript due to a lack of evidence to rule them out. So while that lack of evidence means I cannot definitively lay the Chinese Theory to rest, it also means that there is not much here besides just-so conjecture to carry it either. At the same time what I do see, namely the wrong zodiac, contraindicates an origin in the Sinosphere even if such an origin were definitively proved on other grounds.
It's worth demystifying where the inner animals come from to illuminate the likely coincidence here. If you track Jupiter year to year, it appears to move about 30 degrees around the ecliptic, or two solar terms; in practice it accrues about a third of a degree of error per year, but this is neglected in this system and we shall too. If it is after the first term in year 1, it will be after the third term in year 2, and the fifth in year 3. You can assign the zodiac animals this way; rabbit, dragon, snake, and so on. This gives a superficial resemblance to the Babylonian zodiac, but both the derivation and practice are quite different.
Now, I know what you're going to have me do. I'm going to be asked to imagine a fictional story where this superficial resemblance is seized on by a Voynich artist. But none of that is in evidence! It is inherently problematic for the Chinese Theory that it requires a just-so story to explain away the mismatch here, first because it's pure speculation and then again because it's a plain admission that inconvenient parts of the manuscript must be speculated away. The actual premise of your argument here is that the manuscript is, at least in part, not copied from Chinese sources. I think that should bear on how we evaluate the hypothesis that there may be Chinese underpinnings to the less certain parts, and not favorably.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - rikforto - 04-12-2025
To put this another way, after a few minutes' reflection while doing the dishes, I don't think arguments that the manuscript is unreliable are necessarily wrong, but they are a dubious foundation for any theory that rests on them. Perhaps a good many details openly contradict the manuscript's origins, but that's deeply problematic for deducing the manuscript's origins from the manuscript!
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 04-12-2025
(04-12-2025, 11:52 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why? If the author wanted to save the knowledge, it would make sense to have it all together.
Sure. As a small booklet or loose leaves, on the same shelf where he kept the loose sheets of the VMS.
Quote:And yet, what you have shown [with the mock conversation] was exactly the opposite, that author immediately got very useful information about an unfamiliar term that made a lot of sense to keep and that could have been likely lost if the author didn't keep a note of it.
But even if such interaction had been practical, the information he would get would probably less than what he could read on the text iself.
This seems to be the entry for Ephedra in this edition of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (entry 120), with the Google translation:
- 麻黃 味苦溫無毒。主治中風傷寒頭痛，溫瘧，發表出汗，去邪熱氣，止欬逆上氣，除寒熱，破癥堅積聚。一名龍沙。生山谷。
- Ephedra is bitter, warm in nature, and non-toxic. It is used to treat stroke, typhoid fever, headache, malaria, to induce sweating, to dispel pathogenic heat, to stop coughing and shortness of breath, to eliminate chills and fever, and to break up hard masses and accumulations. It is also called Longsha. It grows in mountain valleys.
The COT assumes that the Author mastered the spoken language well enough to devise a phonetic alphabet for it. So maybe he would not need a glossary to understand that entry?
Quote:[people turned to European language with complex encription] because of total lack of any specific evidence pointing to any non-European culture, while abundance of evidence pointing towards Europe.
Which is precisely what I wrote: they assumed that the language was European because the material, layout, style, and imagery are definitely European.
But that inference is a non-sequitur...
Quote:You created a scenario that can explain the present state of the manuscript by introducing a specific interaction of several parties: the reader, the author, the scribe, possibly the retracers.
Again, the claims "The Scribe Was Not The Author", "There Was a Draft", and "Much of The Text Has Been Retraced" are totally independent of the "Chinese Origin" theory. Even if your theory turns out to be the correct one, I will continue to support those three claims, with the same arguments and evidence.
And even if those three claims are debunked, I will continue to support the COT, with the same arguments and evidence.
Quote:[evidence for] Chinese hypothesis seems lacking so far. Statistical similarities between Voynichese and Chinese are very limited.
The "limited" is a subjective evaluation. I think the length distribution and structure of the lexicon are quite strong evidence.
On the other hand the statistical similarities between Voynichese and other "Non-Chinese" languages are less than zero.
Quote:What is more important, if Voynichese was a faithful phonetic representation of any natural language, it would have been solved at least partially by using label correspondences in the text.
But what label correspondences do we have? The only one I know is the Pleiades. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a list of their modern names in ten out of possibly 50-100 candidate languages.
The modern Mandarin name is 昴, which apparently means "hair" or "hairy", translated also as "Hairy Head". Here is how that name is rendered in four modern Romanizations:
- Pinyin: mǎo
- Wade-Giles: mao3
- Yale: mǎu
- Gwoyeu Romatzyh: mao
- IPA: mɑʊ̯214
The many alleged plant identifications do not provide correspondences either, because, as I see it, on each plant at best one or two details (root, maybe leaves) were copied from the Author's draft, while the rest was made up or cribbed from random European herbals and "alchemist herbals". Thus, for example, while You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is almost certainly Viola tricolor, the text on that page is quite probably not about Viola tricolor, but about some other unknown and unrelated plant. (And this Frankenstein Herbal Theory too is largely independent of the COT. I would support it even if your origin theory is correct.)
Quote:As far as I remember, the Chinese theory "solves" this by suggesting the author used an imperfect transcription for 240 pages without having any second thoughts
The diary of the Lewis and Clark expedition is a text that should be used as a control in any statistical analysis of Voynichese. (I have started preparing a version suitable for such purposes, but it is a big task.). I once counted five different spellings of the word "buffalo"/"buffalos", even two in the same paragraph. And that is nothing compared to the names of the Native American tribes that they met. And the valiant military officers who wrote them were properly educated in English...
Quote:, without even questioning why the label for, say, "root" ended up spelled differently on many occasions
We don't know even whether the labels mean "root", "red", "stinky", "poisonous", or "Number 17". How can we tell that they were spelled inconsistently?
And anyway, as shown above with "mɑʊ̯214", the spelling system could have allowed the same word to be written in many equivalent ways.
And even Culpeper's Herbal (~1650) has inconsistent spelling of many common words like "alreadie"/"already", "barreness"/"barrenness", "becaus"/"because", "marveilously"/"merveilously", "mouthes"/"mouths", etc. That would not have bothered readers of the time...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 04-12-2025
(04-12-2025, 03:06 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is there an attested Chinese tradition of representing the 24 solar terms with abstract circular diagrams?
I could not find any depiction of each solar term as a circular diagram with 15 labeled slices. But I did only a very superficial search. I owe you that one. What comes up all the time is single circular diagram with the 24 solar stations.
By the way, how common are depictions of the Western Zodiac where each sign is depicted as a separate diagram with 30 individually labeled slices?
Quote:Does that tradition link them to the somewhat uncommon 12 zodiac sign divisions of the ecliptic?
Again, those 24 solar terms were apparently grouped or spanned by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. associated with 12 animals (Tiger, Rabbit, etc). IIUC, they are about 15 days displaced from the Western Zodiac divisions. These labels are not specific to that use; they were used since antiquity to number things in any set of 12 things. They are the same labels used in China to label the years in a 12-year cycle.
Quote:Would the Ming literati have considered this tradition among their most important, in line with the way you present the VMS scribe asking for the most important books?
I didn't check the dates, but those 24 solar terms seem to be still very important, with festivals and customs attached to specific points. (For example,立春=lìchūn is the first point on that 360-degree cycle. For astronomical reasons I didn't understand, sometimes a year of the lunar calendar falls entirely between two consecutive lìchūn solar points, so that there is no lìchūn in that year; and it is considered unlucky to marry in such a year.)
Quote:there is not much here besides just-so conjecture to carry it either.
Well, I think that there is a lot more evidence than there if for the "Contents is European" theory.
Quote:You can assign the zodiac animals this way; rabbit, dragon, snake, and so on. This gives a superficial resemblance to the Babylonian zodiac, but both the derivation and practice are quite different.
But, apart from the decoration, there is hardly any similarity between the VMS Zodiac and Western (Babilonian) Zodiac, is there? We have what was presumably 12 diagrams with 30 labeled "things" each (not 28/29/30/31), but two of those at the beginning are split into four diagrams of 15 "things". Why is that more similar to the Western Zodiac than to the Chinese solar terms?
Quote: I know what you're going to have me do. I'm going to be asked to imagine a fictional story where this superficial resemblance is seized on by a Voynich artist. But none of that is in evidence!
Indeed, that is a superficial resemblance. Even if the VMS Zodiac section was about Western astrology, with one page for each "sign", the diagram on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. would have nothing to do with scorpions, dragons, or whatever that thing in the center is. It would be three lines of text about a certain interval of the year, and a list of 30 words, presumably associated to the days in that interval. That would be its contents. The drawing at the center is just decoration. We presume that the interval in question is ~10-24 to ~11-22 because we deduce that the drawings should have been a scorpion, based on the drawings of adjacent pages; and the Western Scorpio sign is that interval. But what evidence is there that the intervals covered by each diagram matches the Western Zodiac divisions?
(By the way, the Western Scorpio sign seems to be astride the Dog and Pig branches of the Chinese 12-branch solar calendar. Could that "scorpion" drawing be actually a dog? Or a dog-pig hybrid? Both were eaten in China, it seems, so it would make sense to develop such hybrids. Hmmm... Another budding theory there?
)Quote:It is inherently problematic for the Chinese Theory that it requires a just-so story to explain away the mismatch here, first because it's pure speculation and then again because it's a plain admission that inconvenient parts of the manuscript must be speculated away. The actual premise of your argument here is that the manuscript is, at least in part, not copied from Chinese sources.
I don't get what you mean by "just-so story". Would that include the secret community of daiin worshippers who needed to communicate their heresies in a devilishly complex code, and filled the VMS with bogus drawings to throw the inquisitors off their track? Or the Swiss doctor who made it a point of deforming every detail of every plant on his herbal, even the very common ones, to protect his secret formulas?
How do the European Origin theories handle those discrepancies -- the unidentifiable and absurd plants, the fixed 30 days per sign of the Zodiac, the incomprehensible cosmic diagrams, ...?
But yes, the COT says that all the "European" decorative elements, and most of the Herbal drawings, are made up by the European scribe or cribbed from other European books. This claim would explain many otherwise baffling things. What evidence is there that it is false?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - oshfdk - 04-12-2025
I'm not sure this discussion really changes anyone's opinion. To me it's extremely implausible that a person would create a manuscript in a custom alphabet to represent phonetics of a foreign language and would neither include any notes in their own language nor a sample of the original foreign writing. For me it would require some strong evidence to point towards the Oriental origin to circumvent this omission.
The only situation this would make sense to me if the goal of the author was to conceal the information in the first place. If it was so, there is no reason to presume that the author was trying to preserve the original phonetics rather than obfuscate them, and essentially we have a ciphertext hypothesis with a foreign plaintext. Then we have the very same problems as with the other ciphertext solutions, it's unlikely to be a simple substitution or any one-to-one cipher due to implausible statistics for repeated word combinations, and one-to-many (for example, homophonic) ciphers are fairly hard to break. Adding on top of this the possibility of an old lost version of the original language and an old lost version of the original text, we are in the realms of ciphers nearly impossible to solve. So, after many suppositions and assumptions we probably come to a dead end, same as with many competing theories. What's the benefit of this approach?
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 04-12-2025
(04-12-2025, 07:08 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What don't you understand about this plant?
They are all European plants and they all occur in the same region. Most of them even grow right outside my front door.
I have now given so many examples that even you must slowly realise that they are real.
What was said 40 years ago is bullshit.
First, neither of those two plants is a perfect match.
Sanguisorba officinalis:
- The flowers are completely wrong. In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.., the red cylinder is an inflorescence, a bundle of very small flowers, with petals only 1-2 mm long, that bloom gradually from the base up. In the VMS drawing, the flowers grow singly on each branch; each flower has a large oval calyx and a corolla of largish petals.
- The leaves are indeed similar, in that they are triangular and have serrated edges. But on the VMS picture they are fused in pairs around the stem, whereas those of the real S.off. are separated.
- The roots are a good match to those shown on that herbal image, except that the latter are not hairy. However, that herbal does not seem to match You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., nor this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Filipendula vulgaris:
- The flowers of the VMS drawing do not look like the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., not at all.
- The leaves are vaguely similar only to the point that they have many fingers, each with many teeth. But the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a long plume with a dozen or more fingers, each a separate leaflet, placed alternately along the central stalk. Those of the VMS drawing are short, with only half a dozen fingers, all fused together. Also the real leaves radiate out from the base of the plant in a rather compact bundle, while those of the VMS drawing grow from branches up high.
- The roots are a fairly good match, although the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seem to generally have only one tuber on each branch, and long thin branches between and beyond the tubers.
Now, you will argue that the discrepancies are due to intraspecies variation, and/or to lack of artistic ability by the scribe, and/or to him copying the plants from herbals that are copies of copies of ... instead of from nature. And I would even concede that some discrepancies, like the triangular spikes on the flowers of the F.vulg. drawing, are not original but fanciful additions by a later Retracer.
But if we must allow for discrepancies of that magnitude in order to get a match, then in any comparison of a hundred random plant drawings to thousands of European medicinal species we will get dozens of false positives -- apparent matches between drawings and plants that in fact have nothing to do with each other.
Second, those two plants above, and the few plants that I accept as convincing matches (f2r Nymphaea, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Viola tricolor) grow natively all over Eurasia, including China. So, even if we accept those matches, they are not evidence of "European Origin". Are there matches of plants that grow only in Europe?
And Third, even if there are matches for VMS Herbal plants that only grow on Europe, it only proves that those drawings were copied from European herbals. But the Frankenstein Herbal Theory (which is independent of the Chinese Origin Theory) says that each VMS herbal drawing consists of one or two details copied from the same source as the Pharma drawings, with the rest being invented or copied from European herbals, realistic or "alchemical" (fictional).
The arguments for the FHT include the exact match between some details of Herbal plants with drawings of Pharma, the fantastic features of some VMS Herbal plants (like converging branches), and apparent partial matches of some VMS Herbal figures with drawings on some alchemical herbals. What are the arguments against the FHT?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Aga Tentakulus - 05-12-2025
1. I never claimed that the plants only occur in Europe. I said that they all occur in the same region (only in Europe do they all occur simultaneously).
2. You claim that the flowers are inaccurate. But you accept a water lily, even though the flower does not match the VM drawing at all. This is what a water lily looks like.
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3. You complain about accuracy. Show me a few plants drawn in 1400 that are accurate enough for you.
4. You fundamentally reject anything that contradicts your Chinese theory.
5. You do not understand the art of representation and the importance of details.
Example: They are the same plants, and in the VM it is f94r.
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6. Basically, you are not up to date. You've simply missed too much in recent years.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 05-12-2025
Quote:1. I never claimed that the plants only occur in Europe
And I did not mean to claim that you did. I only pointed out that the best identifications that I know still are not specifically European.
(05-12-2025, 12:51 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.2. But you accept a water lily, even though the flower does not match the VM drawing at all.
I was trying to be generous. If we exclude that case, my point is even stronger: the only VMS plant that is definitely identified, not just "most similar to" -- namely f9v, Viola tricolor -- is native to all of Eurasia. Thus the match is not a sign of "European".
Quote:3. You complain about accuracy. Show me a few plants drawn in 1400 that are accurate enough for you
The point is not that "the VMS drawings are bad". The point is that, if one must tolerate errors of that magnitude when comparing drawings (of any medieval manuscript) to real plants, one will inevitably get many false matches. Therefore, finding a few such "matches" does not prove anything.
Quote:4. You fundamentally reject anything that contradicts your Chinese theory.
It is the other way around. I believe in the Chinese Origin theory because I see several bits of evidence for it, and I still don't know of any good evidence or argument against it. Do you have any?
Quote:5. You do not understand the art of representation and the importance of details
But how do you square this with point 3 above? If Medieval drawings are full of gross errors and fictional details, how do we know whether a certain detail is significant and important?
Quote:6. Basically, you are not up to date. You've simply missed too much in recent years.
Frankly, I was surprised at how little the field has advanced in the last 20 years.
When I left, the C14 date had just came out, Rafal had just found that Barschius worked at Rudolf's court, and Gordon Rugg was still pushing his "grille hoax" theory.
What great advances have there been since then?
I see that there have been studies of dresses and hats that merely confirmed the C14 result.
We got the Beinecke 2014 scans, which Rene used to produce a much better transcription.
We got multi-spectral scans of 10 pages, but it seems that people have not yet analyzed them properly. (No one had noticed that big water stain on the UV images of f116v, for instance.)
We got the McCrone report. I already posted what I think of it. But anyway it did not tell us anything that was significant and unexpected.
Rene and his collaborators have uncovered an amazing amount of details of the history of the VMS between Barschius and Beinecke, and tracked down the probable "bearer" of the "600 ducats" book.
We already knew that the VMS had been scribed in Europe. Koen mapped the occurrence of the characteristic Ghibelline merlons and concluded that the VMS was scribed specifically in a smaller area between Northern Italy and Central Europe.
Someone discovered that the trivial line-breaking algorithm results in different word distribution at the start and end of each line. That could explain at least some of the anomalous statistics at those positions. (But this possibility does not seem to have been properly investigated yet.)
The Rohonc Codex was deciphered! (It is not directly related to the VMS, but it is another example of a baffling manuscript that was almost wrongly dismissed as a hoax.)
What else have I missed?
All the major mysteries that were baffling in 2005 are still baffling today.
We still don't know the language and the "encryption method", of course.
We still don't know what exactly is the Voynichese alphabet. Not even whether hooked-p is the same letter as straight-p.
We still don't know whether the drawings in Bio are organs disguised as baths, or baths shaped like organs, or organs disguised as baths shaped like organs, or...
We still don't know the meaning of a single word of Voynichese. (Maybe the Pleiades, but it is just a name...)
We still can't read the marginalia of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f116v.
We still don't know what is the language of the month names.
I see people still proposing bogus substitution-cipher "translations" into every language known and unknown to man. The only new thing there is that the LLMs have increased the frequency from one proposal per month to 2-3 per week.
There have been a couple more "hoax" proposals, describing methods that, like Rugg's, generate random text that superficially looks like Voynichese. But the resemblance does not go very deep. And, like Rugg, the proponents of those methods could not explain why the the Author would have chosen to generate that weird kind of gibberish.
Between the card punch days and 2005, a zillion statistical studies had revealed some intriguing patterns in the Voynichese text. But no one could get definite insight into the "encryption" out of those numbers. Since 2005, there have been a zillion more studies -- but apparently with no better success.
So I still don't think that I missed much...
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Bluetoes101 - 05-12-2025
Claire Bowen and Luke Lindemann's work on entropy was a pretty big step I think, to add to the list.
A problem is a lot of small amounts of better understanding buzzes around for a few minutes, hours or days then is basically lost. So some of the "not got very far" is that its just all over the place. The barrier to entry on the VMS is also growing for interested people. I have been thinking something like Jason Davies site but with most agreed upon notations for details on each page would be an amazing thing to have, to better log what we do/don't/might know.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - R. Sale - 05-12-2025
Perhaps the discoveries are not great enough, but what is missing is the period of time where the ability of internet image search really started to flourish. This led to the comparison of certain VMs illustrations with particular historical images. And, depending on the provenance of the historical image, this provided certain chronological and/or geographical information of varying specificity.
The fashion investigation of 'sleeves' is not a mere confirmation. It is a clear indication that the VMs artist was familiar with the fashion events that began and ended in the first half of the 15th century - coincident with the parchment C-14.
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And before that, the investigation of the VMs cosmos. The cosmic comparison provides two more historical sources, both from the first half of the 15th century and both from Paris. Then there is the "mermaid", and her historical connections.