The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[ololololo]

Stolphi, you said that the flourishes at the ends of the two quirks on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are meant to parody the movement of the hand when writing иероглифы. But that’s not entirely convincing.
   
   
The lower arrow shows exactly the same curl. The upper arrow generally resembles this curl, but it is more detailed.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Thank you for the clarification. I am glad we can agree that there is no classical text dividing a solar term into 15 parts.

To be precise, we agree that we do not know of any such text.

Medieval and early Renaissance Europe already had a highly developed and sophisticated astrological system based on Ptolemy, Arabic translations, and the Alfonsine Tables (as eggyk mentioned earlier).  If the Author wanted to enlighten Europeans about Chinese medicine, he might copy a herbal. But why would he abandon his familiar Ptolemaic astronomy and try to translate an official Chinese astronomical treatise

For the same reason that he would have wanted to copy the herbal.  For the same reason that Europeans in the 1300s translated the element theories of Caliphate alchemists like Geber -- even thought they had the theory of Aristoteles.  Because it was different, and therefore probably contained ideas, facts, methods etc. that might be better than those known in Europe.

(Geber's books made just a few tiny contributions to European alchemy, like distillation and the sulfuric, hydrochlorc, and nitric acids; and aqua regia, the first substance besides mercury that could dissolve gold.  Geber's element theory was an elaboration of Aristotle, and implied that one could transmute one metal into another by a suitable chemical manipulation.  I think that aqua regia and this theory were the reason why the transmutation of base metals into gold became such a common goal of European alchemists after 1300 or so.)

Note that the Author was creating the VMS some 100-150 years after Marco Polo.  The book of Marco's travels was still a best seller, and must have raised interest for more information about China. 

The VMS Zodiac section is undeniably European in its visual structure (Aries, Taurus, etc.)

  

The only thing in that section that relates to European astrology is the figures at the center of each diagram.  Even the names are those of months, not of the signs depicted in them.  The Author presumably wanted to show the approximate correspondence of those 12 or 24 divisions to the European Zodiac and Calendar.

If the Author brought back Chinese astronomy, why is there not a single Chinese constellation (like the 28 Mansions) visible?

Well, the diagram on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has 28 "logs"...

Anyway, the Scribe had very little sensibility for geometry; he could not even divide a circle into four equal parts, and in many Zodiac diagrams he miscalculated the space and ended up drawing nymphs and labels outside the diagram to make up the required 30.   The Author himself probably did not have the time to understand Chinese star charts, even if they were explained by a native scholar.   Given these shortcomings, if they tried to copy a star chart, the result would probably be like f68r1 and f68r2: just a bunch of stars with labels in random positions.

Also, a different way to partition the stars into constellations would have no interest or utility in Europe.   What would attract more interest would be a different way to cast horoscopes.  Like the Solar Terms...  An Astrologer might get an advantage by advertising his services as "Horoscopes Cast While U Wait by the Arcane Chinese Method"...

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Stolfhi, you said that the flourishes at the ends of the two quirks on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are meant to parody the movement of the hand when writing ideograms. But that’s not entirely convincing. The lower arrow [in an ornate initial] shows exactly the same curl. The upper arrow generally resembles this curl, but it is more detailed.

Sure, the resemblance to the "serifs" of brush strokes could be merely accidental.  That glyph could also be a plow, a Fountain of Youth, a "K" for "König" rotated 90 degrees, two scimitars rising over a city wall...

... but the Chinese Origin theory happens to provide an explanation for all three ...

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Now, look at the VMS. The sh -> qo dependency identified by JoJo_Jost and others occurs blindly across all tokens. It does not matter what the supposed meaning of the word is, or what section of the manuscript it is in. The dependency is uniform, mechanical, and completely oblivious to any semantic content.

That is what he claimed originally, but his own data shows otherwise.  The "qo attraction" is a property of some common words that happen to begin with Sh; but there are other words that begin with Sh which show "repulsion" to qo instead of attraction.

I am preparing a reply to that claim with more details on that.

All the best, --stolfi

[JoJo_Jost]

That's not really an argument...

For yet it's striking that for almost all words where “sh” precedes a sequence of glyphs—a sequence that could also be preceded by “ch,” “k,” or even “t”—‘sh’ is always the most common, and the order of the glyphs “ch,” “k,” (and “t”) remains similar.

That's structure, not language.

   

[rikforto]

What would attract more interest would be a different way to cast horoscopes.  Like the Solar Terms...  An Astrologer might get an advantage by advertising his services as "Horoscopes Cast While U Wait by the Arcane Chinese Method"...

There is no great mystery about Chinese horoscopes, and the main challenge in casting them is converting the calendar date to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The VMS zodiac would fail to do this for the simple reason that there are not reliably 30 days between major terms under any definition. The days are named under that system, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and should show strong cycles of repeats if it is meant to represent a single year, and have two words per nymph as a matter of course under the linguistic assumptions of the theory. None of these predictions are borne out.

Most importantly, I think, is that Chinese fortune telling usually doesn't make use of the 24 solar terms, but the 12 solar months. There is a straightforward correspondence between the 12 major terms and the solar months, so if there were other lines of evidence to Chinese divination I would relent on this point, however, it would remain true that the divided signs are superfluous to a divinatory explanation. It seems extremely problematic to me that the only element that seems unambiguously Chinese is both hard to reconcile with the rest of the textual evidence and is superfluous to the proposed interpretation. This is a lot of strain to account for 20% of the signs attested in the VMS, especially since the divided signs remain straightforwardly, if speculatively, resolved by noticing that 15° + 15° = 30°, as one would expect if there was no systematic significance to the division.

To that point, it bears repeating that you are hastily discarding the tradition of monomoiria in Europe; after fading in Late Antiquity, it reenters Europe in the 1200s and is still in active transmission in 1480s. (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is another manuscript with similar entries to Astrolabium Planum, dated only to the 15th century. The scan is terrible and from what I can tell there isn't a narrower date, though others, especially German speakers, may be able to get further than I. From what I can make out, and that is a very live qualification, it seems similar to Angelus.) The absence of a direct antecedent to the VMS, especially in the art, remains challenging, but the Chinese Theory does markedly worse on this score, having no manuscript tradition whatsoever at present. If we can imagine that there is some yet-unseen Chinese manuscript tradition, we can surely infer a gap in the attestation of the monomoiria tradition which almost surely must be the case given the bracketing dates between The Lapidario and Astrolabium. It doesn't settle the question definitively, but the repeated assertion that there is no European tradition of 12x30 "things" is simply willful denial of the evidence at this point.

At any rate, the conjecture that this is for horoscopy is a research agenda, one that should readily turn up a direct antecedent in China if that is the standard you are holding competing theories to.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

For yet it's striking that for almost all words where “sh” precedes a sequence of glyphs—a sequence that could also be preceded by “ch,” “k,” or even “t”—‘sh’ is always the most common, and the order of the glyphs “ch,” “k,” (and “t”) remains similar.

Yes, I understand now that your claim is not about the Sh-qo attraction itself, but the fact that the attraction is stronger for Sh than for Ch or k.

But in those few words that you showed, the ratio of frequencies "qo after ShXXX" over "qo after ChXXX" varies enormoulsy depending on the XXX -- from ~5 for Sheo and Sheor to almost 1 for Sheedy, Sheody, and Shy.

And the same variation of the ratio is seen when comparing ShXXX to kXXX.  In fact ko attracts qo more strongly than Sho ...

That is language, not structure... 

But indeed it is intriguing that that similar words like Shedy, Sheey, Sheedy and Sheody have similar statistics (like that one).   I have a possible explanation; please stay tuned. 

But before calling these similarities "not natural", we should actually check whether they are indeed absent in Mandarin in pinyin.  But not using a correct pinyin text, but instead a text that a non-Chinese could produce if he heard dictation in Mandarin and tried to write down the pinyin, without understanding half the words...

In fact, similar words correlating with similar meanings, which in turn could lead to similar ulage, it a feature of many Indo-European and Smeitic languages.  Even in English, I bet that the words "this" and "that" and "these" and "those" will have similar statistics...

All the best , --stolfi

[ololololo]

But not using a correct pinyin text, but instead a text that a non-Chinese could produce if he heard dictation in Mandarin and tried to write down the pinyin, without understanding half the words...

He must understand the meaning of the words, without necessarily knowing how to write them down. Otherwise, it turns out that the author went to China, learned the language at least somewhat, but in the end wrote a book that he himself doesn’t understand at all, and hired clumsy scribes and clumsy artists. This is gradually turning into a Chinese fairytale rather than a Chinese theory...

In fact, there is a precedent for what you’re saying — it’s the Arabic language. It could have been written down from hearing, which is why Muhammad became Magomet. As far as I remember, this originated with Voltaire and was not someone’s initiative, but rather a generally widespread tradition. But they knew very well who "Magomet" was.

---

That glyph could also be a plow, a Fountain of Youth, a "K" for "König" rotated 90 degrees, two scimitars rising over a city wall...

Hieroglyphs and letterforms remain the most suitable explanations for these glyphs. They appear at the beginning of paragraphs, are separated from the letters, and are highlighted in red. Among other things, they are drawn in three‑dimensional form.

. but the Chinese Origin theory happens to provide an explanation for all three

No, it doesn’t explain. There’s no explanation for why they’re so poorly copied and why only here. Did the author just not bother to add more Chinese characters to his little Chinese booklet?

[Amphigorist]

I have a hard time understanding why someone transcribing spoken Chinese would use a wholly novel alphabet. Even if there were sounds that didn't occur in their native language, and they could distinguish them as different, instead of mishearing them as more familiar phonemes, it seems like the simplest thing to do would be to create new characters for those sounds, like Sts. Cyril and Methodius did. 

Even then, assuming they understood spoken Chinese and were having the book read to them, it seems like writing a translation or even transliteration in a familiar language would be far more useful. The only reason I can see for using a brand new script is that we are starting with a particular manuscript.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

He must understand the meaning of the words, without necessarily knowing how to write them down. Otherwise, it turns out that the author went to China, learned the language at least somewhat, but in the end wrote a book that he himself doesn’t understand at all

Most of the words in the SBJ are names of plants, minerals, animals, diseases, or health benefits.  They were written ~300 BCE,  Even traditional Chinese doctors today cannot identify some of them.  Yet the SBJ is still read/copied/printed in its entirely (apart from accidents of manuscript copying and print editing).

Linguists routinely copy down the speech of "natives" that they barely understand. 

(Once I remotely helped a poor linguistics student in the US whose thesis was about an extinct Native American language.  His material was a bunch of stories dictated by native speakers to a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer in the 1800s. The transcripts had been subsequently typewritten, then copied to a filing cabinet full of punched cards, then transferred to mag tape, which was then read to disk.  Needless to say, with tons of errors added at each step.  I could help him because I still knew the EBCDIC punched card code and thus I was able to correct at least those errors that resulted from the card reader missing a hole.)

(The Pirahã are a tiny tribe in a remote corner of the Amazon.  The language is famous because it is claimed to have no words for numbers, not even for '2'.  The number of linguists who understand the language is less than or equal to 1.  In the mailing list days I corresponded privately with Jacques Guy about the language, because the linguist who made that claim -- Daniel Everett -- got his PhD here at the University of Campinas, and his thesis -- printed non-commercially by the University press -- seems to be the only document with something that could be generously called a description of the language.  According to the intro of the thesis, his field study spanned 2-3 months; he would travel by motorboat from the nearest town to the Pirahã riverside camp, interact with natives for a few hours, and go back to the town -- because the Pirahã had no huts, only some improvised shelters made from branches.  The language is tonal and it verb system is very complex, with almost a dozen suffix slots to indicate all sorts of aspects, like "I saw this myself" rather than "I heard from someone" etc.  Everett at the time had no field experience and apparently did not know any native American language.  Even if he did follow that routine every day, you may wonder how much of the language he managed to learn, without any interpreter or bilingual native.  Curiously the number of tones and the verb suffix system in his thesis do not match what was recorded by another linguist who had briefly studied the language some years earlier. My personal opinion is that he never really learned the language.  Including their words for numbers...)

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an excerpt of the Lewis and Clark diaries (1804).  Note how Capt. Clark struggles to record phonetically the names of places and tribes and other terms in languages of which he has at best a very imperfect knowledge (including, apparently, the English one).  

Even the Hebrew Bible has words whose meaning is now uncertain or unknown. 

This is gradually turning into a Chinese fairytale rather than a Chinese theory...

On the contrary, that scenario is perfectly realistic.  Much more plausible than all "encrypted" or "gibberish" theories...

Hieroglyphs and letterforms remain the most suitable explanations for these glyphs. They appear at the beginning of paragraphs, are separated from the letters, and are highlighted in red. Among other things, they are drawn in three‑dimensional form.

But the Scribe surely could read ornate Latin letters.  The glyphs are definitely not Latin letters nor embellished Voynichese glyphs.  So, if they are ornate letters -- which script could they be from?

There’s no explanation for why they’re so poorly copied

They went through at least two steps of copying, probably three: the Author copied the characters to his notebook while in "China"; then, back in Europe, he copied from notebook to the final draft, and then the Scribe copied from the draft to the vellum.  The Author could not read Chinese characters and surely did not know the mechanics of drawing them with a brush.  The Scrube probably had never seen any Chinese writing in his life.  

and why only here? Did the author just not bother to add more Chinese characters to his little Chinese booklet?

Why would he copy more? Those three were presumably copied only for decoration.  Like someone might copy a few runes on the cover of a the book about Vikings, even without understanding them.

(But maybe there were more recognizable Chinese characters, or definitely Chinese details in the missing folios -- and that would be why they went missing...)

All the best, --stolfi