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+--- Thread: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against (/thread-4746.html)
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RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 20-09-2026
(19-09-2026, 04:53 PM)chenxiang wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.what the first character of the next word is depends mainly on semantics ... "remote effect" in Chinese [comes from] is grammatical structure, with clear semantic boundaries.
As I pointed out in my previous message, the point is that there are marked short- and long-range non-trivial statistical dependencies between hanzi in Chinese texts, including in the Shennong Bencao.
Yes they are due to semantics: common multiple-hanzi phrases that may or may not be tied to the topic of the text, and common grammatical constructs. And that is why those "remote effects" are seen in the VMS, even in other sections besides the SPS.
Quote:Tone sandhi: Chinese has tone sandhi for "一" (yi) and "不" (bu), but this is strictly limited to the immediately following syllable (adjacent), and is absolutely never affected by prefixes several words prior (such as the hypothetical affixes "sh", "ch").
Wikipedia says that tone sandhi in Mandarin is much more pervasive. In addition to those two cases,
- When there are two 3rd tones in a row, the first one becomes 2nd tone. E.g. 你好 (nǐ + hǎo > ní hǎo)You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is pronounced at different pitches depending on what tone it follows.
And I read somewhere that the first rule applies to multiple syllables. That is, nǚ zǐ rǔ would be pronounced nǘ zí rǔ. Is that true?
Even these tone sandhi effects between adjacent syllables could explain "remote effects" in a phonetic transcription, depending on how tones are encoded.
In the "numeric" version of pinyin (also used for Cantonese jyutping and other phonetic systems for other languages), the tone is indicated by a digit at the end of the letter. Thus the Wikipedia rules above would be
- A syllable that would normally end with '3' changes its ending to '2' if the next syllable ends in '3'.
- For certain common syllables, their final digit will be the same as that of the previous syllable.
But there is another way to encode Mandarin tones, which is to assign digits 1-3 to pitch levels (low, medium, high) and use them to indicate the tone profile. For example, hǎo could be written 2ha1o3 (or 213hao, or ha213o, or any of many other ways).
In this notation, one can also omit the pitch digits when they don't change. For example fú zhī qīng shēn bù could be written 1fu3 2zhi qing shen2 3bu1 or even 1fu3 zhi qing shen 3bu1 I suspect that the Vounichese letters a, o, y may be encoding tones this way.
In this notation, tone sandhi can have effect over several syllables.
Quote:Counter-evidence: If a Chinese text describing different plants has character sequence statistics that do not vary with the type of plant (semantic content), but are strongly constrained by prefixes like "sh", "ch", "k", etc., spanning multiple characters to determine the probability of the subsequent "q(o)", then this book is absolutely not a natural language botanical monograph, but can only be an encrypted text or generated pseudo-text.
See again the first recommendation in my previous post...
Quote:does this "remote effect" mean the clue "daiin = 主" is completely dead too?
As explained above, definitely not.
But note that not every daiin means 主, just as not every "shi" means teacher (or stone, or lion, or whatever).
It is the other way around: as far as I have checked, a 主 in the SBJ corresponds in the SPS to a daiin or one of its few recognized variants.
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - ololololo - 20-09-2026
(20-09-2026, 05:39 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.orry, but no, it is nowhere near "the same thing".You took ONE recipe (you’re not showing the others) and found SEVERAL matches (4 exact and 4 partial).
There is a difference — I just didn’t draw any conclusions from it
(20-09-2026, 06:07 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In other words, "The theories that say it is encrypted offer no plausible explanation for why it was encrypted, nor why the book was created."This argument doesn’t hold up well, because there’s the Copiale cipher. Why would it need to be encrypted? You could have just hidden it properly...
(20-09-2026, 06:07 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the book was not meant to be shown to others, why did the Author decided to have it copied onto vellum? Why did he waste so much vellum with blank spaces in the herbal and with nymphs in the Zodiac?He deemed it necessary... Or is that illogical?
(20-09-2026, 06:07 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Which part of the Chinese Origin theory you think is implausible?Rather forced than implausible.
I’m not convinced by the theory that he copied the book just to sell it. Okay, but why would he go to China for that? He could have simply drawn a few funny plants in his own incomprehensible handwriting and sold that profitably as well.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - nablator - 20-09-2026
(20-09-2026, 08:24 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But recently someone tried to refute the SPS=SBJ claim by pointing out that the SBJ has more repeated words and phrases than the SPS. Ahem....
"Ahem" is not a counter-argument. Refuting your claims is like shooting fish in a barrel.
See posts #527 and #528 in this thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Many long repeated sequences in the SBJ vs. many babble-like repetitions and quasi-repetitions in the SPS: similar words in close proximity. Two very different types of repetitions.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 20-09-2026
(19-09-2026, 05:15 PM)ololololo wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We can’t apply this to anything; for now, it’s just a coincidence.
Indeed its a coincidence. Or several coincidences, maybe a couple hundred.
But the word "coincidence" means just "to fall on the same spot" or "to happen on the same time" etc. It does not imply anything about its cause, or whether the cause is relevant to one's purpose. To say that the cause is irrelevant you must qualify "meaningless coincidence" or something like that.
Are the 主 <-> daiin coincidences meaningless? To say that, you would have to compute the probability of they happening if the positions of 主 in the SBJ and the positions of daiin in the SPS were due to two unconnected processes with suitable probability distributions. Have you computed that probability?
Quote:In the VMS text, there are cases where daiin is repeated twice. So, these excerpts should be read as “take for take for?”
The spoken English word "to" can have several very different meanings -- including the preposition "towards", the number 2, the adverb "also", and a verb prefix to make the the infinitive form. In the sentence "Give two bucks to guard 1 and two to 2 to get in", there are four "to"s in a row. Should they be parsed as "... and 2 2 2 2 get in"?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - ololololo - 20-09-2026
(20-09-2026, 09:49 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The spoken English word "to" can have several very different meanings -- including the preposition "towards", the number 2, the adverb "also", and a verb prefix to make the the infinitive form. In the sentence "Give two bucks to guard 1 and two to 2 to get in", there are four "to"s in a row. Should they be parsed as "... and 2 2 2 2 get in"?Of course not. But if we evaluate it from a Chinese perspective?
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 20-09-2026
(19-09-2026, 12:53 PM)Aga Tentakulus wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.These aren’t characters either, but symbols. One is definitely a plough
Why are the plough arms drawn that way, with flared ends with two sharp points? The VMS Scribe had poor artistic skills, granted; but surely he could have been able to draw a plough that looked like a plough?
Quote:has something to do with farming, as can also be seen in Quire 13.
I can't see anything in Quire 13 (or in the whole VMS) that has anything to do with farming.
Maybe some of the plants in Herbal and Pharma are crops, but there is no drawing of seeding, harvesting, ploughing, irrigation, etc.
Quote:The other is an ancient symbol of medicine and pharmacies.
Sure, if you set the criteria of similarity loose enough, you could say that the top weirdo is the symbol for veterinary(?!) medicine (with the horizontal bar representing the word "veterinary").
But it would still be more similar to a Chinese character like 冬, upside down...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - rikforto - 20-09-2026
(19-09-2026, 11:52 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I never claimed there was some "lunar month" stuff in the VMS. On the contrary, that concept is notable for its absence. Instead, what I see is that the Zodiac section divides the year into 12 sections of exactly 30 "things" (or 24 sections of exactly 15 "things"). That is neither the Western Zodiac nor a solar or lunar calendar.At one point we went around on this for awhile and the reason you are saying "things" is because you acknowledged that the interpretation of them as degrees was untenable in 1400. I again ask: If not degrees, what are they? A solar term divided the year, not the ecliptic, and did so based on time, not space. The division you are describing is based on work done with the Jesuits, and required a translation of Kepler's work. So, where is this pre-1645 example of dividing the ecliptic into 24 sections of exactly 15 "things"?
I found one system that divides the Ecliptic into 24 sections of exactly 15 "things". The problem is, it is a Chinese system called the "solar terms" ...
(20-09-2026, 06:19 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What else could he have done?Nothing is very much an option here, and one that has an immense amount of explanatory power for why you cannot get a consistent correspondence between the two texts!
(20-09-2026, 06:19 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Zhenghe Bencao editors who copied the SBJ into their encylopedia already could not understand many parts of it. (Like those comments in the Rooster recipe about heads hung on the East gate, turning eggs into amber, and what were those "chicken white grubs". And already could not identify several of the plants.)I would like to see your sources on this reception, not because I think this is impossible, but because I want to be clear what exactly is being claimed. There is a distinction to be had here between the linguistic difficulties you've been leaning on, that the hypothetical Author could not distinguish between words in spoken Chinese, and the kind of cultural reception these examples seem to reference, such as not knowing the exact context of hanging a rooster head on a gate. Your exposition might be providing clarity that is not in the text, but it seems like the text is understood from the way you are talking about it. At any rate, I would like to read for myself the underlying scholarship here for all three of these claims---the head, the egg, and the grubs---because my sense from your presentation is that it is a very different issue than would lead to someone writing the same word a dozen different ways.
With that in mind, you keep framing this in terms of his goal being to bring Chinese knowledge to Europe, but in order to achieve that goal, there needed to be someone who could read it and understand it at the end. If you think this could not be understood in China, then it was a hopeless task for him in Europe. If he could not take the dictation with reasonable accuracy, if there is no clear system for recovering the text, then that knowledge was never even lost because he never even had it. He would have known this as he was taking the dictation and he would have known this as he was reading back over it. What else could he have done at that point? I doubt he existed, so who is to say?
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 20-09-2026
(20-09-2026, 02:05 AM)eggyk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well.. there is also the horoscopes found in Alfonso's manuscripts, and later the Astrolabium Planum, which splits each zodiac sign into 30 separate sub-characters. Alfonso's works also contain zodiacs in the middle of large circular diagrams surrounded by 30 drawings[
Indeed, I grant that Alfonso could have been the source for the 12x30 scheme. (The Atrolabium however is too late, after 1480.)
But if the VMS Author got his Zodiac scheme from Alfonso, why did he think it was OK to split Aries and Taurus into two 15-thing parts?
Quote:As far as I know, there is no evidence of any link with Chinese solar terms apart from the fact that it is split as 12x30 or 24x15.
I don't mean that it is sufficient proof of the Chinese Theory. It was just one more bit of evidence supporting it.
But now the coincidences between SPS and SBJ make that detail unimportant. The 24x15 bit would only suggest that the Zodiac section too may be a copy of a Chinese astronomy/astrology book.
Quote:I'm also unaware of any examples of eastern imagery that depict solar terms alongside zodiac symbols in any way, let alone in a way relevant to the VMS imagery.
Again: apart from the plant images in Pharma and possibly in the Herbal too, the drawings in the VMS were provided in large part provided by the Scribe, often (badly) copied from other books.
In the Zodiac section, the illustrations are just decoration, even if it was the Author who determined their general form and contents. The information in each page is only the circular text, the ordered list of 30 labels, and the names of the approximate Western sign and calendar month that somehow correspond or overlap the 30° arc of the Ecliptic being referred to. Even if the poses of the nymphs are encoding some information, that would be only a few extra bits per label. All this information could be more economically and practically given by a table and 2-3 short parags.
In any case, if the Zodiac section is a copy of a Chinese book, the correspondences with the Western Zodiac and Calendar would have been added by the Author.
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - eggyk - 20-09-2026
(20-09-2026, 11:28 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Indeed, I grant that Alfonso could have been the source for the 12x30 scheme. (The Atrolabium however is too late, after 1480.)
But if the VMS Author got his Zodiac scheme from Alfonso, why did he think it was OK to split Aries and Taurus into two 15-thing parts?
Well, both seem to match in the content they are depicting (see the comparison I made in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which suggests the underlying content on which both were based was present at the time of the VMS being made.
The reason why they could be split without issue is likely the same reason why the author of astrolabium planum felt that he could split it into 30 individual squares. The relevant subjects were the figures surrounding the zodiac symbol, not the zodiac symbol itself. So perhaps he wished to use the given space more cleanly, or thought it looked nice, or perhaps he drew the circles too small and decided to split them in 2. Perhaps the specific symbols were of more importance to the author or to the customer(s) using the book (For example, the man was born during taurus, and his wife in aries) so were given relatively more importance. I don't know.
But the specific reason doesn't really matter, because this specific content is unaffected by the split.
The same question could be asked for any possible source, including eastern astrology. And i'm sure the same answers apply: author preference, mistakes etc
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 20-09-2026
(20-09-2026, 02:05 AM)eggyk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(19-09-2026, 11:52 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is no such thing as "the" probability, either. The probability of a statement is a numeric expression of our belief is true. Therefore "my" probability is different from "your" probability which is different from that other guy's probability. Because the probability is determined by the totality of what one knows and how one reasons.
What? Either the probability of your matches being coincidence are based on some actual mathematical foundation, or they aren't. Otherwise, what is to stop you from saying "I found 1 word that matches once, therefore it is proven to be a match". There has to be some kind of standard of proof here, or everyone will just claim anything without any proof at all.
That is unfortunately a common misconception: that probabilities are "physical" properties like temperatures or latitudes, that can be measured or calculated in an objective way.
But the truth is like I stated above.
Probabilities cannot be measured by some "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (p.37)".
Probability theory cannot produce any specific probability, not even the popular 50% for heads in a coin toss. It only gives math formulas that tell how to keep one's probabilities consistent: like "your probability of heads plus your probability of tails cannot exceed 1.0, and the difference must be your probability of all other outcomes combined, including the coin falling on its edge or being snatched by a magpie in mid-air." But ultimately all your probabilities will depend on some key probabilities that you can and must choose without a mathematical justification.
Joe throws a die, and his probability of it showing '3' is 1/6 is because he believes that there is only one '3' on that die, and has no reason tho give one side of the cube more probability than any other, and he knows that the probabilities must add to 1.
His grandma Jane is sitting at his side, but her probability of a '3' is 80% because she had a vivid dream where her great-great-grandfather appeared and told her to bet on '3'.
My probability of a '3' is 50% because I used my parlor magician skills to replace Joe's die by one that has '3' on three of the sides. Thus I bet $12 on '3' against his $24 on any other number. Probability theory then tells me that my expected win is 0.5 x $24 - 0.5 x $12 = $12; while the same theory tells him that his expected win is 5/6 x $12 - 1/6 x $24 = $6.
But I did not notice that Penn and Teller are sitting next to me, that they saw my swindle, and that they counteracted it by replacing the die with another one that is heavily loaded on the '4' side. Based on a few test throws they did previosly with that die, their probability of a '3' is only 5%.
But none of us realized that the elderly gentleman sitting next to Joe was his uncle Uri Geller, who proceeded to use his psychokinetic abilities to make sure that the die always came to rest with the '3' side up. (While bending everyone's car keys as an unintentional side effect.) So his probability of a '3' is 100%.
And all six of us are correct according to probability theory.
Quote:Can you honestly say that if you were reading this thread (written by someone else), that you would consider this theory as being proven?
Obviously I cannot give an impartial answer.
But yes: if I started with no opinion on the matter, after looking at the data provided, quickly checking the statistics of 主 and daiin and doing some rough estimates of the probability of the coincidences being due to mere chance, I should set my probability of the claim SPS=SBJ being true to something like 90% or more.
Quote:Why are you convinced of something that you do not think people will be convinced by?
Because I know that many people are already firmly convinced that the text is a heavily encrypted European language, or random gibberish, or Bavarian or Greek or whatever with a non-standard spelling.
A very important tool of probability theory is Bayes's formula, that tells how you should change your probabilities when you learn new relevant data. It is totally deterministic and mathematical -- but it says that your probability of X after seeing the data D depends on your probability of X before seeing the data, and your probability of the data D coming up depending on whether X is true or false.
In particular, if your probability for X before seeing some evidence D was 0.01%, and D could be remotely the result of chance, the formula says that you should rather believe that D is almost certainly due to chance, and raise your probability of X to only (say) 0.02%.
If that is your case, it will take a lot of evidence to raise your probability of X above 50%.
Quote:To me, this seems like the theory version of many imagery comparison threads, where someone goes "look, these two diagams look similar, they must be related. What are the chances that these things match up perfectly?".
Yes, it is fundamentally the same situation: getting people to revise their probabilities of Y ("the VMS author had a microscope") by presenting some evidence E (the image of a diatom next to page f69r).
The difference is just the numerical values of the probabilities involved and how much they change after seeing E. For me, the probability of the similarity I can see in E being due to mere chance is very high, because in my view the image of a chariot wheel or open umbrella or any of a thousand other objects would look just as similar to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as the diatom. Thus seeing E has hardly any effect on my probability of Y.
Whereas, by my estimates, the probability of the length histograms match and the coincidences in gap sizes of 主 and daiin being due to mere chance is so low that it raised my probability of SPS=SBJ to near 100% from the previous value of (say) 1%. That is where it was when I was already quite convinced that the text was in some unencripted East Asian language, but I did not know which books, if any, it was transcribed from.
All the best, --stolfi