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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 - rikforto - 22-09-2026
(22-09-2026, 12:15 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From the Wikipedia page you linked to make this point some months ago:Quote:the entire idea of dividing the ecliptic with 24 evenly spaced solar terms didn't exist yet
You are quite wrong. The 24 solar terms were defined sometime around 100 BCE.
Quote:The modern definition using ecliptic longitudes, introduced by the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is known as dìngqì fǎ (定氣法; 'steady term method'). Under this method, the determination of solar terms is similar to the astronomical determination of the special cases of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. dates, with different ecliptic longitudes to solve for. One can start with an approximation and then perform a correction using the anomalies and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the sun.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. may be used to query for exact times of solar terms.Shixian calendar was made in collaboration with the Jesuits and relies on Keplerian mechanics; the solar terms were still uneven in 1400. (Unironically, I think time travelling Jesuits would be really cool.)
The older method, called the píngqì fǎ (平氣法; 'equal term method'), simply divides the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. into 24 equal parts.
(22-09-2026, 12:15 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No, I could not find any source that claimed that people did know what that phrase meant, in 1400 CE or any time later. Did you?I mean, it was written in a language every literate person in the empire knew. That doesn't preclude thorny passages, but the presumption in face of the lack of evidence to the contrary is that it was perfectly understandable. I do not understand this need to constantly mystify Classical Chinese.
(22-09-2026, 12:15 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Scribes, scholars, and students in the Middle Ages would often copy books that they did not understand.Okay, do any of these result in "bringing knowledge of Chinese medicine back to Europe" because it would not seem so to me. I don't understand why you are posing your theory to me as a riddle, either!
Archaeologists still often copy inscriptions that they do not understand.
Linguists often write down stories told by natives in languages that they do not understand.
Why do they do it?
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 22-09-2026
(22-09-2026, 02:24 AM)rikforto wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[quote='Jorge_Stolfi' pid='91546' dateline='1790032535']From the Wikipedia page you linked to make this point some months ago:
Quote:the entire idea of dividing the ecliptic with 24 evenly spaced solar terms didn't exist yet
You are quite wrong. The 24 solar terms were defined sometime around 100 BCE.
Quote:The older method, called the píngqì fǎ (平氣法; 'equal term method'), simply divides the tropical year into 24 equal parts.
Reply to @JoJo_Jost - Jorge_Stolfi - 22-09-2026
(22-09-2026, 06:30 AM)JoJo_Jost wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The problem, however, is that this approach allows you to retroactively label any “disturbing” form as an error. In this way, almost any finding can be dismissed.
Not so much, because the errors must be plausible.
- Errors that were incurred by the Author while taking dictation should be mostly omission of a phoneme (glyph of diglyph), replacement of a phoneme by another with a similar sound, or undue duplication of a glyph that can be duplicated (like writing cheedy for chedy or daiiin for daiin).
- Errors made by the Author when rewriting and editing his dictation notes could additionally be sequence errors like skipping a line, or omitting or repeating a string of one or more words. They could also include substitution of a letter by a letter that had a similar shape in his own handwriting (like an s by an r, or a iin by a ir) or accidental omission or truncation of a stroke (like turning y into a or o, Sh into Ch, or Ch into ee).
- Errors by the Scribe when copying the Author's draft to vellum could be all of the above; but the confusion of letters with similar shape may have been be much more frequent. The Scribe may have also omitted many spaces or inserted many bogus ones.
- Errors by the Global Retracer should be mostly omission of strokes or glyphs that had completely faded away (like turning a t into a k, or a d into an s), or mutation of glyphs into other glyphs or weirdos with roughly similar shape (like turning an a into an ei, or a Ch into an Ih).
- Errors by the modern transcribers should mostly be incorrect guessing of glyphs with ambiguous shapes (like halfway between r and s, or between a and o), omission of spaces, or transcription of bogus spaces.
Here is another way of stating your objection above: Since it is possible that 5% or more of the VMS tokens and spaces are erroneous, one should not attach much significance to any statistical peculiarity that could be a consequence of those errors.
Quote:But I do realize that these sh/ch structures I’m pointing out here at least have the theoretical potential to call your Chinese theory into question.
I do not see that yet. As I wrote, your numbers are saying that some Voynichese tokens that begin with Sh or Ch are often followed by some tokens that start with qo (more often than what would be expected if each token was chosen independently of the preceding one.)
But that is not incompatible with the Chinese Origin theory (that the text of the VMS is a phonetic transcription of a text in some East Asian monosyllabic language). On the contrary, the COT predicts that there will be several "remote effects" like that one.
I have not checked, but I am assuming that in Shakespeare's Hamlet a token that begins with "th" is often followed by one that begins with "i", more often than expected by chance. Would that be evidence that the text of Hamlet is not in a natural language?
Quote:in the REVA analysis (Eva reverse), this phenomenon ... doesn’t occur at the token level here, but within words and when read backward, it sort of dissolves.
I don't get it. It you reverse the glyph order in each token, the same "remote influence" effect should still be there: namely, a token that ends with -Sh or -Ch should often be followed by a token that ends in -oq.
And if you also reverse the order of the tokens in each line or parag, you will probably find that a token that ends in -oq will often be followed by a token that ends in -Sh or -Ch. Isn't that the case?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - eggyk - 22-09-2026
(22-09-2026, 07:22 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The older method, called the píngqì fǎ (平氣法; 'equal term method'), simply divides the tropical year into 24 equal parts.
As far as I can tell from a look online, the older system did not divide the ecliptic into 24 equal parts. It divided the year into 24 parts of just over 15 days each.
But this doesn't really change that much with regards to that fact that there was a 24 * ~15 system.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 22-09-2026
(22-09-2026, 09:59 AM)eggyk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As far as I can tell from a look online, the older system did not divide the ecliptic into 24 equal parts. It divided the year into 24 parts of just over 15 days each.
But this doesn't really change that much with regards to that fact that there was a 24 * ~15 system.
Exactly. I previously retracted the claim that the VMS "things" (label+star+nymph groups) are Babylonian degrees (which would have implied a division of the Ecliptic rather than the year).
I have also suspended the claim that the Chinese explicitly divided every solar term interval into 15 parts (which would each be a 365.25/369 = ~1.01458 days, and would be the meaning of the VMS "things"), because I could not find a detailed description of the system that could have said so. Maybe @chenxiang can help me find it?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - JoJo_Jost - 23-09-2026
Note: Stolfi posted this response to my questions here in the Chinese thread in my Bavarian thread. I’m bringing my reply back to this thread to keep the discussion organized. For context, I'll give you the link? of his answer.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
@ Stolfi,
Quote:The "attraction" that you see is the sum of individual word attractions, so it is dominated by a few high-frequency words.
That is precisely the explanation I have already tested. And it is not sufficient.
In the hapax group, each preceding word form occurs exactly once. That is the group we need to examine. Nevertheless, 20.8% of sh-tokens are followed by a qo-token, compared with only 10.8% of ch-tokens. There are no frequently repeated preceding words in this group that could dominate the difference.
My statement that a hapax cannot have a collocation may have been too absolute. But that correction does not explain away the finding: a few repeated word pairs do not explain the difference within this group.
Quote:First, many hapax words in the VMS are probably malformed, truncated, or joined versions of words that appear multiple times.
You are introducing an additional assumption here: that the rare forms are actually erroneous variants of frequent words. That may or may not be the case. It is another unsubstantiated assumption on your part. The much more important question is: does this assumption actually account for the difference between sh and ch? If YOU introduce assumptions, YOU need to substantiate them. Sorry, but that is how it works.
Quote:Well, I think that it is you who should answer that question.
You propose frequent word pairs as an explanation. I show you a finding that this explanation does not account for. Replying that I should explain it is not an adequate answer, even if intended as a joke. ?
Your explanation must fit the data. Not the other way around.
Quote:If the ch-words are mostly variant spellings of the sh-words, then the two variants should show similar attraction or repulsion for each qo-word (or any other word) that follows it.
Okay, then let us look at the corresponding forms.
I compared all exact shXXX/chXXX pairs in which both forms have at least 20 occurrences with a following token on the same line. The entire remainder is identical. Only sh and ch differ.
The result: 21 pairs of forms. In all 21 cases, the sh-form is followed by qo more frequently. Not a single pair shows the opposite direction.
Here, too, shedy cannot produce the difference observed for sheor. Each pair of forms is compared separately. Yet every pair shows the same direction. This consistent direction therefore calls for an explanation.
None of the checks you requested has refuted the phenomenon.
Quote:Then I would expect that the two will have different attraction or repulsion numbers.
Of course different words can have different neighbors. But the question is not whether differences are possible.
The question is: why is it specifically the sh-form that has the higher rate in all 21 pairs?
“These are different words” does not yet explain this shared pattern. And “these are spelling variants” does not explain it either, as long as the alternation between sh and ch is supposed to be independent of context.
There is also the comparison of the exact words shor and chor, without prefixes: after shor, the next token begins with sh in 26.6% of cases; after chor, only in 7.3%. Conversely, ch follows chor in 32.7% of cases, but shor in only 11.7%. Clear differences remain even when each distinct complete token pair is counted only once.
You can make all kinds of assumptions here: errors, variants, or grammatical classes. But sorry, you need to show which of these explanations actually accounts for the finding. Further assumptions do not dispose of my objections either. Show that this fits Chinese. (English comparisons do not establish that, given how different Chinese and English are.)
Quote:It is not that, but rather that this kind of result is unlikely to lead to any useful insight into the Voynichese "grammar".
Through this analysis, we have established that the difference exists among forms occurring only once, shows the same direction across frequency groups, and favors sh without exception in 21 exact sh/ch pairs.
What justifies dismissing this information as unproductive before you can explicitly explain it?
Here in the Chinese thread, my question therefore remains: what specific relationship in your proposed language and writing system produces these patterns?
Once again, several assumptions have been put forward without the supporting evidence. A demonstrated explanation is therefore still missing. Your response does not refute the findings, nor does it justify abandoning the analysis that brought them to light.
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 23-09-2026
(23-09-2026, 08:15 AM)JoJo_Jost wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What justifies dismissing this information as unproductive before you can explicitly explain it?
First of all let me say that I will use the word "error" as a shorthand for any variant spelling of the same word -- whether it results from actual dictation, copying, and digital transcription errors, or from sandhi (like English "a" changing to "an", or Japanese "hiaku" changing to "biaku" or "piaku"), pronunciation variations, grammatical inflection, non-phonetic markup (like like our upper and lower case, or the English apostrophe in "the monks prayed" vs. "the monks' lodging" vs. "the monk's robe"), an alternative to separate punctuation, etc.
And, for brevity, I will say "character" to mean either a single character or a digraph, trigraph, etc.
Character-based statistics could lead to understanding of some low-level features of the VMS creation process. Like, they could reveal that there is some percentage of errors affecting certain characters.
But, by themselves, no amount of character statistics can lead to an explanation of more complex processes. They will not even distinguish between the above causes of "errors". They will not even tell whether any detected anomalies are properties of the characters, or rather of some common words that happen to use those characters. See again the hypothetical example of "th"-words and "i"-words in English.
To have any chance of understanding what the anomalies actually are, and infer their probable causes, you must look at word-based statistics. As you did -- thanks!
Quote:Quote:The "attraction" that you see is the sum of individual word attractions, so it is dominated by a few high-frequency words.That is precisely the explanation I have already tested. And it is not sufficient [because the attraction shows also among hapaxes]
IF most hapaxes are indeed "errors" (as I suspect), then most Sh-hapaxes will tend to be variants of the most common Sh-words. Then the next-word statistics for the Sh-hapaxes as a whole are expected to be similar to those of the most common Sh-words.
Quote:You are introducing an additional assumption here: that the rare forms are actually erroneous variants of frequent words. That may or may not be the case. It is another unsubstantiated assumption on your part.
Indeed I do not have strong evidence to support this hunch of mine, and I don't recall why exactly I came up with it. But I seem to recall that, when I worked out my word structure model, I found that most of the tokens that violated it (some 5-6% of all tokens) were hapaxes.
I don't know how we could get a conclusive proof or disproof of this conjecture, without deciphering the meanings of the words. Until then, I will consider this conjecture at least possible, and thus mostly disregard any statistics computed over the hapaxes.
But now let's look at your table of frequencies and qo-attractions for the main Sh- and Ch-words.
In my VMS transcription file, ignoring commas, I count 32189 words that starts with at least two EVA letters [a-z][a-z]. Of these, 2972 (~9%) are Sh-words, 5659 (~18%) are Ch-words, and 4903 (~15%) are qo-words. So, if successive words were chosen independently at random, a Sh-word or a Ch-word would followed by a qo-word ~15% of the time.
Looking at your table, I see that the frequency of qo-words after a Sh-word varies a lot, from 9.6% for Sho to 53% for Sheedy.
Thus the hypothesis that "qo-attraction" is a property of word-initial Sh- is not tenable. Indeed, the words Shar, Sho, Shol, Shor and Shy seem to exhibit "qo-repulsion", while Shear is practically indifferent to qo's charms. If anything, it seems that, among the words you tabulated, "qo-attraction" is a feature of the endings -iin, -y (except for Shy!), -eol, and -eor, rather than of the initial Sh-. (But I doubt that this alternative "qo-loving suffixes" hypothesis will hold for all the other words that are not listed in your table.)
Looking now at the Ch- words, it seems that only ChCKhy, CheCKhy, Chedy, Cheedy, Cheey, Cheody, Chey, and Chody show "qo-attraction", while Chaiin, ChCThy, and Chdy are practically indifferent, and the other Ch-words generally show "qo-repulsion" -- sometimes dramatic, like Chor (only 6 in 205, or 2.9% are followed by a qo-word) and Cheo (only 1 in 76, or 1.3%). Again, these numbers contradict the thesis that qo-attraction (or repulsion) is a property of word-initial Ch-.
However, qo-attraction seems to be roughly similar for similar words, like Shedy, Sheedy, and Sheey. These similarities could be explained by "errors" -- namely, if most of the Sheey (144 occurrences in your table) and Sheedy (83) are variant spellings of Shedy (412).
Same for the "qo-repulsion" of Sho (125 occurrences), Shol (182), Shor (94), and Shy (87). Indeed I have long suspected that the ending -o is an error from -y, or the result of a bogus space being inserted after the o in longer words that contain it (like Shol or Shor).
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - JoJo_Jost - 23-09-2026
@ Stolfi, since you’re basically not saying anything really new anymore, and I can’t really add anything new to this either—except to throw even more statistics into the mix, which you’ll again only partially acknowledge—I’m calling it quits on this discussion. It’s a waste of both our time.
I was less interested in whether and how this peculiarity could be woven into your theory than in asking the chinese participant in the Chinese thread whether such a phenomenon exists in Chinese. But I think we’d need a Chinese linguist here who’s also knowledgeable about older languages.
It also bothered me that you’ve now simply declared your theory to be proven—even though there are still significant weaknesses—especially in the assumptions you need to make to calculate your probability. You’re equating words that, based on their contextual behavior in the VMS, very likely don’t correspond to the same Chinese word. But that would open up yet another can of worms with many probabilities, which wouldn’t lead to anything else anyway. I’d much rather get back to working on my own theory.
What I find particularly interesting is that the oddities mentioned here simply disappear when the VMS is read backward, just like many others—and a much clearer structure then becomes apparent.
And this happens in such a simple way that I now want to explore this approach more intensively and further, because it has really convinced me.
But for me, a theory is only proven if it can explain these peculiarities of the VMS AND make the plain text readable. Until then, it’s all just—how do you say it?—mere theory.
Have fun
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - Jorge_Stolfi - 24-09-2026
(23-09-2026, 06:41 PM)JoJo_Jost wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@ Stolfi, since you’re basically not saying anything really new anymore, and I can’t really add anything new to this either—except to throw even more statistics into the mix, which you’ll again only partially acknowledge—I’m calling it quits on this discussion. It’s a waste of both our time.
Okay, if you are not convinced by the evidence I have, I don't know what else I can say now. I hope one day you will see the light.
But I don't see which statistics you are referring to. The Sh-qo attraction? I have replied to those, and I don't see how they contradict the SPS=SBJ claim or the Chinese Theory in general. That "attraction" seems to be specific to certain words, not to the Sh character. And And any natural language, including all East Asian ones, will have such "attractions" between words.
Quote:It also bothered me that you’ve now simply declared your theory to be proven—even though there are still significant weaknesses
Well, *I* find the evidence irrefutable. I see practically zero probability that all those coincidences I found are due to mere chance.
And I also cannot understand why people refuse to acknowledge that the statistics of Voynichese are quite compatible with an East Asian monosyllabic language, and quite INcompatible with any European language, any plausible encryption scheme, and any plausible gibberish generation method (yes, including copy-an-mutate).
But, sigh, such is Bayes...
Quote:What I find particularly interesting is that the oddities mentioned here simply disappear when the VMS is read backward
How could that be? If there was some "remote attraction" between a Sh at the start of a token and a qo at the start of the next token, in the reversed text there will necessarily be a "remote attraction" between a Sh at the end of a token and an oq at the end of the previous token.
And probably there will be also "remote attraction" between an oq at the end of a token and a Sh at the end of the next token.
Quote:But for me, a theory is only proven if it can explain these peculiarities of the VMS AND make the plain text readable.
Well, the SPS=SBJ "theory" does explain all the peculiarities of the text that I know of, and it did produce the plain text -- even for the four missing pages. Except that the order of the plain text parags ("recipes") in the VMS is still to be determined; but I am working on that.
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against - JoJo_Jost - 24-09-2026
As I said, I won’t be investing any more time in the discussion about the Chinese theory, but for many reasons that have come up in my research (some of which aren’t even related to the Chinese theory), I’m no longer convinced, since much of it doesn’t align with “normal” language. The problem is, I’m not familiar with the specific peculiarities of the Chinese language, and that simply makes me uncertain about applying these statistical oddities to Chinese.
However, when I see how many assumptions you need just to establish your theory in the first place, I’m still not convinced, too.
For example, you use a VMS passage that belongs to the passages in the VMS with the highest aiin/air ratio. 40 percent (!!!) of the tokens contain an aiin or an air. That makes such comparisons much easier. “If you also take into account how much leeway you allow for the position of each individual crib, a match is by no means unlikely—especially if several different Voynich forms are accepted as matches.”
This is also evident from the fact that earlier (if I understood correctly), you initially used “dair” in line 34 and have now switched to the following word, “okaiin.” So I’d say there’s a lot of variation!. But even without the “air” variants, you still have 25 percent of the tokens that contain “aiin.” But u say: the different “aiin” variations are all errors - the VMS text actually consists almost entirely of errors, which can then be used to justify absolutely ANYTHING. Explanations like that just leave me with a very uneasy feeling. And you’d feel the same way if the tables were turned!
I also think the selection of which of these “aiin” words belong and which don’t has been retroactively adjusted and justified. Tricky...
But, to avoid getting bogged down in further discussions: If you can produce plain text consistently across multiple paragraphs without making too many new assumptions, that would be much better proof. So I’ll just wait for that… it’s less time-consuming than continuing to discuss this here.
-----
As for the backward direction: There’s a difference between having a letter in the forward direction that influences the first letter of the next token across several identical glyphs, and having a letter in the backward direction that influences the next letter and the one after that, creating a completely normal, linguistically coherent chain from which this connection becomes apparent. (In addition, in many everyday languages—and presumably in Chinese as well—the last letter or letters do have an influence on the next word. In any case, this influence is greater than that of a letter at the beginning of a word on the next token. But u dont need that in backwards!!)
The example of “qo” clearly illustrates that there really is a difference between forward and backward:
In the forward direction, “qo” is an atom because “q” is followed by “o” nearly 100 percent of the time. In this respect, one must group “qo” together as a single atom in one’s analyses.
In reverse, there are the variants “o” at the end of a word and, alongside that, the variant “oq.” As far as I can recall, the ratio is roughly 60 to 40. In this respect, the “o” does not belong 100 percent to the “q,” but is essentially a variant of the “o” ending. That is, how should I put it, easier to work with. And according to Ockham’s Razor, I prefer these simpler things.
...
In reverse, the structure of the VMS is also much more uniform and fits together better - see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.