The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Aga Tentakulus]

I can't see anything in Quire 13 (or in the whole VMS) that has anything to do with farming.  

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Explains everything from sowing (top right) through to harvesting and drying, right up to the point where you separate the chaff from the wheat, or something like that.

[Aga Tentakulus]

           
I’ve looked at lots of ploughs; I’m sure it’s a plough.

[eggyk]

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.

This is ridiculous. In every case, for every person, there is a 100% chance of a 3 facing up when the die is rolled because that is the reality of the situation. 5 people just have incorrect starting assumptions. Their "being correct" amounts to "they correctly calculated their answer from incorrect numbers", which means they are wrong. If they were to test their probabilities by rolling the dice over and over, they would quickly be proved wrong, and would have to change their assumptions. 

This gets to the fundamental basis of discussing reality. Unless you are going to start claiming that we are all living in literally different realities, we must assume that everything being said has some underlying factual or logical basis that can be tested in some way. Your underlying assumptions about the VMS are either right or wrong (or a mix) because they are assertions about the properties of reality itself. 

So, if your underlying assumptions used to calculate your probabilities are wrong, your probabilities are likely correctly calculated, but wrong with regards to reality.

Aren't we all trying to get closer to the actual truth here? Not my truth, not your truth, THE truth. The VMS is something. There do exist hypothetical correct assumptions about its nature. We should be trying to determine what they are, and then running probability theory against that. Not whatever this is.

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.

If you are convinced that that is the reason people have an issue with your methodology here, please reconsider. This almost feels like its getting tribal. I'm sure many of us here are discussing this in good faith and with an open mind.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

[quote="JoJo_Jost" pid='91398' dateline='1789888176'But “sh” simply behaves differently—across all tokens ... “sh” is drawn to “qo.” [/quote]

NO, not "all tokens"!

Let

• SHDY be the set of all tokens that match the RE pattern r"^\[q]?[o]?[dkl]?she?(dy|ey)$"  -- that is, "shdy", "shedy", sheedy", "shey", "sheey", possibly preceded by "d", "k", "l", "qo","qok",etc.
  
• XSHY be the set of all other tokens that contain "sh", besides those in SHDY.
  
• NOSH be the set of all tokens that do not contain any "sh".
  
• QOWW be the set of all tokens that start with "qo".
  
• NOQO be the set of all tokens that DONT start with "qo".
  

Here are the counts of consecutive token pairs in my transcription of the SPS, combined into the above classes:

          QOWW   NOQO
  SHDY      97    110
  XSHZ     151    369
  NOSH    1062   6075
    
Thus, reading by rows:

• A SHDY token is followed by "qo" ~47% of the time.
  
• Any other token with a "sh" is followed by qo ~29% of the time.
  
• A token without "sh" is followed by a "qo" ~15% of the time.
  

Reading by columns:

• A "qo" is preceded by a SDHY token 7% of the time, by another "sh" token 12% of the time, and by a non-"sh" token 81% of the time.
  
• A non-"qo" token is preceded by a SHDY token 1.6% of the time, by another "sh" token 5.6% of the time, and by a non-"sh" token 93% of the time.
  

Thus, while "sh" tokens do seem to be attracted to "qo" tokens, some "sh" tokens are clearly more attracted than others.  

So you cannot say that the attraction to "qo" is a property of the "sh" alone.  It depends on the whole token.  

So your claim "sh is attracted to qo" is like saying that in English, tokens that contain "th" are attracted to tokens that begin with "i".  Even if that is true, it would be a pretty useless statistic.  Much more useful would be to say that in English, the tokens "this" and "that" and "there" and "it" and "he" and "she" are often followed by "is" or "isn't".

My partition of "sh" tokens above into SHDY and XSHY was just a crude guess.  If you want to understand what is going on, you should look closely at which tokens are most common before which "qo" tokens.  I bet that, while many of the former may happen to be "sh" tokens, it will not be a categorical thing -- the "qo"-lovers will probably include other non-"sh" tokens, and I bet that some "sh"-tokens will definitely avoid "qo"-tokens.

All the best, --stolfi

[chenxiang]

I have some bad news, not about the manuscript but about myself. I have a bit of a fever, and I feel dizzy and disoriented. My current thinking ability is perhaps not even as good as a normal person's.

If the questions previously asked of me are not very urgent, I might answer them a bit later.

However, I am also very curious about one thing: what is our current progress? Is there any exact or definitive result in translating the text or the plants? Or is everything currently just a hypothesis?

I am also very curious: have we only tried Chinese so far? What about other languages like German, Egyptian, or various other languages? Have other languages been tried? Have we tried all the languages?

I might say something that discourages everyone's confidence. Don't take it seriously, it's just a guess. Do you think it's possible that the person who wrote this manuscript was writing completely invented characters, gibberish, with no meaning at all, and the plants might not exist in reality at all? For example, what if someone drew the branches and leaves of an apple combined with the roots and stems of a potato? Although it has been mentioned that the manuscript might not have been completed by one person, but possibly by four or five people working together, do you think it's possible they did it this way? To make a huge profit?

I only recently started learning about the background of the manuscript. It seems it was bought by some German king for a lot of money, and it seems it was discovered in some German museum. I might be misremembering some things, please understand, my head is a bit dizzy. If judged this way, it is also possible.

On a side note, let me tell a funny story. In China, there is something called "rubbing" (拓印). Simply put, a thin, tough piece of paper is soaked in water in advance. Then, a brush is used to gently tap it, so the paper sinks into the crevices. After the paper dries, a brush is dipped in ink and gently and evenly tapped. When brushing, the ink is evenly spread on the paper, and then the paper is peeled off, and a rubbing with black background and white characters is completed. It can be used to copy text, or to copy patterns of weapons, pottery, etc. Later, some enthusiasts collected these rubbings, but most were incomplete fragments.

Later, some opportunistic swindlers appeared. Even more absurdly, some took the patterns on a baked flatbread (shaobing), dipped them in ink, and printed them on rubbing paper. Those collectors, who spent a lot of money thinking they were buying fragments of weapons or undeciphered text, could never imagine that those rubbings, which seemed to have research value, were secretly just random patterns and textures printed by casually crumpled flatbread.

But then again, I really hope this manuscript is real. If it is successfully deciphered, the illustrations involving plants, astronomy, pharmacy, and the human body should have important scientific research value for human history.

[eggyk]

However, I am also very curious about one thing: what is our current progress? Is there any exact or definitive result in translating the text or the plants? Or is everything currently just a hypothesis?

I am also very curious: have we only tried Chinese so far? What about other languages like German, Egyptian, or various other languages? Have other languages been tried? Have we tried all the languages?

You may find this thread infomative: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
and the older Nick Pelling site for a list of theories: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It is a list of many claimed solutions. As you can see, a lot has been tried. Languages, non-languages, gibberish, non-gibberish. Even the plaintext on 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. can't be agreed upon, and that isn't even written in voynichese! Various people are convinced of their theory of course, but there is not even close to a single theory that a majority believes is true.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Nothing can tell you how often an “and” will appear in a list—that's impossible, since you can extend the chain endlessly—that's what I meant. And before the first “and,” they don’t know if an “and” will appear at all: I buy houses—there’s no indication whether an “and” will appear or not.

Again, the proper parsing of lists in the spoken language is no sweat to native Chinese speakers because of the semantics, general frequency of usage, and clues like stress, tempo, pauses, etc.  that help parse lists properly.  Analogs using English words and mock Chinese syntax:

• apples cherries sweet nutritious -- the meanings of the words by themselves imply the parsing as apples and cherries are sweet and nutritious
  
• rich famous life -- the common idiom is recognized and implies the parsing lives of the rich and famous
  
• water air oil gas liquid -- if pronounced water, air, oil: gas, liquid the parsing is perceived to be water and air and oil are gases and liquids
  

But to a non-native speaker that is used to connecting list items with "wa-" or "et", those phrases, written without punctuation, would be hard to parse.  Not impossible, just not automatic.

So how is a "Sh" at the beginning of the word supposed to know that an “and” follows?

It doesn't.  See my previous post.  

What is probably happening is that some words that happen to start with "sh" happen to be common in the lists of conditions and benefits that comprise the bulk of the SBJ entries. 

If that is the case, and if qo is indeed a "wa"-like connective added by the Author to help parsing the lists,  you will see an excess of word-initial "sh" before words that start with "qo".  Not because the "sh" glyph attracts the initial "qo".

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And [errors] definitely exist, I’m not arguing that. But there’s a problem: when you say that the scribe made mistakes several times, writing the words kaiin, laiin, and dain instead of daiin, that’s an assumption, because it can’t be proven in any way, but without it, the SPS = SBJ theory falls apart.

Again, that is a deduction that follows from noting the positions of 主 in the longest SBJ recipe and which words occur at the corresponding positions in the longest SPS parag.  And besides those specific variations have several a plausible explanations, including the possible similarity of sounds, sandhi phenomena, and the graphical similarity between k, d, and l in the Author's draft.

The author wrote a book in phonetic Chinese on strange folios, contacted various Chinese people to have their works dictated to him, and upon returning to Europe, he decided to abruptly abandon his great endeavor to enlighten Europeans about Asian medicine, hired inept scribes, and made them copy his drafts so that he could sell them...
This is more of a fairy tale than an explanation.

First, note that the generic Chinese Origin theory has now been superseded by the specific SPS=SBJ claim.  The evidence that I used to put forward for the former are still valid, but not as strong as the textual coincidences between SBJ and SPS.

The point of the "Dictation Scenario" was, and still is, only to show that there is at least one plausible explanation for how a Chinese text could end up in Europe, on European vellum and with European parag layout, written and illustrated by Scribe who was obviously European.  That Scenario does not specify exactly how the Dictator was recruited, how the dictation was arranged, etc. 

And that Scenario is not required for the SPS=SBJ claim.  It is only what I think is the most likely history.  The creation of the VMS seems to have involved dictation because of the nature of script and of the "spelling variations"; but the dictation could also have taken place in many other places or circumstances.

For instance, it could have happened in some port of Persia, Yemen, or Northeast Africa, when the fleet of Chinese-Muslim Admiral Zeng He visited those places between 1415 and 1420.  Maybe and one of the many Chinese doctors on board befriended a Caliphate doctor living there.  

Or it may even have happened in Europe, when an elderly Burmese doctor living in Germany dictated it to his German nephew.  

But these alternatives seem much less likely than the one I have been proposing, simply because there must have been thousands of travelers to East Asia that could have been the Author. 

And I see a contradiction — if the author wanted to enlighten Europe with knowledge of Chinese medicine, why, upon returning to his homeland, did he lose hope and decide to simply sell this book?

We don't know exactly why he decided to put the book to vellum, at which age he did so, how long after he got to Europe, how long it took.  

He had to make at least one copy of his notes in order to share them and still keep them.  Maybe he made more copies, on paper and/or on vellum, that have been lost.  Maybe he decided to make a "nice" copy on vellum for sale because of his financial situation.  Maybe he made it to leave it for his heir, who may or may not have been able to read it at the time. 

And why is the explanation “someone wrote a book and encrypted it” suddenly no longer simple, logical, and at the same time obvious? ... it’s a reference guide. You looked at the required plant, looked at the required diagram.

Again: because it does not provide any plausible explanation for why the Author would have encrypted a book of that kind and size, with those illustrations, and that quite unusual alphabet.

It also does not explain how he could have devised an encryption system so complex that it frustrated the best cryptographers for the last 80 years, and yet produces and encrypted text that looks quite like natural language (just not an European one!).

And if you admit that the copy has a substantial number of errors, that is rather incompatible with the text being encrypted.

The encryption would have made the book hard to use.   For the Herbal and Starred Parag sections, that may still have been tolerable.  But the Bio section does not look like a reference text, rather a continuous discourse, with no "tabs" or section headers. To use it, the Author would have to decode large parts of it.

If the book was intended for use by the Author himself, many illustrations and all the blank spaces would be an unjustified waste of vellum and time.  If it was intended for use by someone else, I can return the question: why did the Author decide to sell a book with all his precious secrets?

Copiale cipher

That is a poor precedent for the VMS.  As expected from a book with secret "heretic" information, it has no illustrations.  The alphabet was derived from the Greek and Roman alphabets.  It is in German encoded with a rather simple substitution polyalphabetic cipher with nulls, a method that resulted in a large alphabet (~90 symbols) and was hard to crack but easy to decode once the key was known.  The nulls and the disguised word spaces resulted in an encrypted text that truly did not look like any natural language (not just European ones).

And it was created in the 1800s, when cryptography was already an old and well-known art.

If the author understood what 主 was, but had difficulty distinguishing the sounds, he would probably have realized that kaiin = laiin = daiin, and would have written it down correctly.

No matter how fluent he was in the spoken language, he surely did not recognize many of the words, because they were technical names for remedies, conditions, benefits, or organs used only by doctors, and many of them obsolete.  Thus, if he heard a kaiin he would be unable to tell whether that was a mis-heard daiin which he knew could mean 主, or some disease called kaiin something.  Again, note that in the SBJ the diseases were all strung together with no "and" or other connectives.

But it seems that when the Dictator read a 主, the Author did hear daiin, and wrote that down -- at least half the time.  

But it is also possible (if not more likely) that he did record every 主 correctly as daiin, but the Scribe misread his handwriting on the draft and often wrote k or l for d.

What didn’t satisfy you about my example with Carmen Arvale?

You shoud know why.  Because the coincidence that you showed, unlike those I have been showing, was very likely (indeed certainly) to occur by chance.

You were free to chose the source text (which was extremely unlikely to be have been a source text for the VMS), a specific bit of it, and a specific bit of the VMS text, that would give the desired match.   You did not even match whole parag to whole parag. 

In contrast, I first chose the SBJ mainly because (a) the number of recipes seemed to match the estimated original number of parags (stars) in the SPS, before the loss of the central bifolio; and (b) it was the most likely answer that a traveler in China or adjacent countries would have heard if he asked a local doctor "what is the most important medical book you have that I could copy".  

That was before I even had the text of the SBJ.  That is, I did not choose the SBJ because it gave good text matches.

Then, I choose to match the "rooster" recipe with parag f105v.32 because both were the largest parags in each text, and indeed outliers.  That is, I had no freedom to choose either of the two texts. 

Again, then it turns out that that SBJ recipe has eight 主 whose spacings match very closely the spacing of eight words in the SPS parag, five of which are daiin and the other three are very similar words.

Finally, it is much easier to find a text with six consecutive repetitions of the same word, than to find one with five occurrences of the same word at specific distances -- like 110, 15, 15, and 45 letters apart.   The former is rather common in certain texts like poetry, songs, grimoires, prayer books, etc.  

Ah, comme la vie serait triste
Triste, triste, triste
Ah, comme la vie serait triste
Si l'on ne pouvait pas chanter.
--Boris Vian, Chantez

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
--Shakespeare, King Lear

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I’m not convinced by the theory that he copied the book just to sell it.

 

At this point, the details of how the book was created and the Author's motivation are no longer important.  It suffices to point out that there are plausible scenarios and motivations that would have resulted in the book we have.

The motivation may not have been immediate.  He probably was amazed at the amount and detail of Chinese medical literature available, and felt that he just had to bring some of that material home, in a form that he could understand at least in part.  Maybe he dreamed that he could sell the book to an Euroepan doctor for a good sum.  Maybe he dreamed of becoming as famous as Marco Polo.  Maybe some doctor back home had asked him to note down any interesting medical information that he found.

why would he go to China for that?

It is not very likely that he went to "China" specifically to learn their medicine.  If the dictation happened in "China", then, statistically, the Author was most likely a merchant who went there to buy stuff that was only found there (spices, silk, porcelain, gemstones, ...).  There for example a record of a Venetian merchant who spent several years in Burma buying rubies to sell in Europe.  

Or maybe the Author was an attachè to an European merchant outpost, like an interpreter or physician.  Or maybe he was an explorer, like Ibn Batuta, Pytheas, Gaspar da Gama...

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I’ve looked at lots of ploughs; I’m sure it’s a plough.

But if the Scribe indeed wanted to draw a plough, would he draw that?  With smoothly curving "handles" ending in broad fishtails?

Note that the Scribe drew the outline of that thing, and then he or someone else filled the outline with that rusty-red paint. 

F76v Explains everything from sowing (top right) through to harvesting and drying, right up to the point where you separate the chaff from the wheat, or something like that.

You do have a powerful imagination...

All the best, --stolfi