(Yesterday, 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").

(Yesterday, 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.

(Yesterday, 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.

(Yesterday, 09:21 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(Yesterday, 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.

(Yesterday, 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,

(Today, 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?

(Yesterday, 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.

• 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.
  

(11 hours ago)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...