The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[JoJo_Jost]

Yes, but to do that, you have to turn the glyph upside down. That’s an additional “assumption.”
However, if you just look at it as is, and remove the pitting, it’s a “2” in one corner—the “2” is an extremely common abbreviation, standing for the Latin “ur” or “tur”—with the symbol next to it, it would be an abbreviation as a whole—and probably not an East Asian character

   

maybe 29??? the year it was created????      (Joke)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The only thing your analysis shows is that a broader claim like “sh is generally higher everywhere” is refuted. But as I said, that’s not what I claimed in the first place.  However, you’re not refuting my actual finding regarding the matched form pairs under investigation.

If q-attraction was indeed stronger for sh-words than for sh-words, independently of the suffix, that would be a strong argument against "unencripted natural language" -- not just East Asian, but any European language as well.  

(It could perhaps be a Semitic or Bantu language, where grammatical inflections affect prefixes rather than suffixes, and thus the prefix of a word may affect the next-word frequencies.  But even there  I bet that we would not see an absolute dominance.)

But since we agree that the q-attraction difference between sh and ch depends on the whole words, not just on their initial letters, this result no longer contradicts the "natural language" theory.  Instead it is even one more bit of evidence for it.  Again, which words can follow any given word is normally determined by grammar and semantics, and these attributes depend on the whole word, not on the letters that it happens to use.

Is this phenomenon compatible with the Chinese one?

There are many statistical "oddities" of the SPS text that would have to be explained eventually.  

Even if not absolute, the larger q-attraction of shXXX compared to chXXX for many common XXX suffixes is strange.   

Someone recently complained that the SPS has too few repeated words and phrases compared to the SPS (which is ironic, since one of the arguments against "natural language" used to be "the VMS has too many repeated words and phrases)

But even more intriguing than your q-atraction differential is why the absolute counts of shXXX and chXXX are so similar, for that set of suffixes XXX that I listed (and maybe others, I haven't checked).  At the moment I cannot think how that could happen under the "unencrypted natural language" thesis.   

If the numbers were just proportional, it could be due to random loss of the plume from the sh; but for the counts to be equal that loss had to have happened with exactly 50% probability.    I thought of some weak cipher that swaps ch- and sh- on evey other word; but that would have broken the 气 = chedy crib that seem to work qute reliably.  Or maybe the author swapped ch- and sh- when he switched from Language A to Language B, and there is just about the same amount of parag text in each language...

But I am violating my own advice #2 here. I should have checked whether the same occurs in East Asian texts, at least in the pinyin reading of the SBJ.  That is, whether there are initial consonants A and B, and a set ZZZ of suffixes,  such that the token counts for Azzz and Bzzz are almost equal, for any suffix zzz in that set.  

According to my advice, I may well be surprised. Like I was ~25 years ago, when I set out to prove that Voynichese was not natural language because You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- and then, almost as an afterthought, I did that plot for Vietnamese...

That said, for many other oddities (like the number of repetitions) the problem is not the lack of explanation, but that there are many possible explanations.  The mapping of the SBJ to the SPS was affected by many processes and variables, like pronunciation variation, sandhi, phoneme confusion by the Author, multiple ways to encode the tones, selective transcription errors, uncertain word spaces, etc.   Sometimes it seems that either the Author or the Scribe could not decide whether a syllable was (say) okedy or okeedy, so he wrote down both.  It would be futile to guess a combination of those factors that explained each oddity.

So my plan now is to first produce enough proof of SPS=SBJ to convince everyone.  The most sensible path after that seems to be to figure out the language, and how its phonemes were meant to be encoded in the Voynichese script.  Then we would be in a better position to explain those statistical oddities.

All the best,--stolfi

[ololololo]

But the Author in the Dictation Scenario too learned the local language from scratch.

He didn’t study it. He learned it to speak, not to study. That’s the difference.

but left some names untranslated.

I’m not arguing that the author might not have known what a particular plant looks like. But the point was that, according to your reasoning, the author didn’t understand the text at all. That is, he was simply recording sounds as they were dictated, without really understanding what he was writing. This is an absurd contradiction. Even in the context of this theory, it’s simply impossible.

Like the Phaistos disk, the Antikithera calculator, the Rodia Towers, the Dead Sea War Scroll, Oetzi's mummy, the Kaaba, Nan Madol...

VMS in your reasoning appears to be the result of some very intricate theory. For example, Nan Madol is a very interesting architectural site because it does not conform to the expected technologies of Oceanic peoples. Nevertheless, it is essentially just structures made of megaliths. That is, it is possible to find a rational explanation for why and how this was done.
The story itself—“a European merchant went to China, learned spoken Chinese, and suddenly wanted to record medical books. He created his own shorthand system to record sounds and decided to use it to record SBS”—sounds more or less plausible, but at best, it’s just possible. However, it can’t simply be applied to VMS, as contradictions will arise, and that’s why the theory continues with something like “but then the author suddenly became impoverished, got hold of some dirty scraps of parchment, found some impoverished orphaned children who wanted to copy his random letters, but oh damn, they made so many mistakes in the text that we can’t read it! And when they were drawing scribbles, instead of the author’s drafts, they took their favorite European manuscripts or re‑drew them!”. It’s possible, but in my opinion, it’s incredible. 

Sometimes it seems to me that you’re just trying to explain absolutely everything using Chinese theory. This inevitably leads to contradictions.

[JoJo_Jost]

So my plan now is to first produce enough proof of SPS=SBJ to convince everyone.  The most sensible path after that seems to be to figure out the language, and how its phonemes were meant to be encoded in the Voynichese script.  Then we would be in a better position to explain those statistical oddities.

I agree 

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Yes, but to do that, you have to turn the glyph upside down. That’s an additional “assumption.”

But it is not just that character.  All three Big Red Weirdos look like badly copied Chinese characters when turned upside down -- and do not look like anything plausible when looked "upside up".

And I even have an explanation for why they were turned  that way.  Chinese books have the binding on the right side, opposite to European books.  So the theory is that the Author, who could not read Chinese characters, instinctively turned the book so that the binding was on the left side...

And for some fun:
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All the best, -- stolfi

PS.  Turning that fun upside-down, I once I saw a T-shirt here in Brazil that said (in English) "Cool Head and Binded Antenna".  Which will only make sense if you know the relevant Brazilian slang from the 90's, and that the Portuguese word "Ligada" has two very different English translations...

[Koen G]

But it is not just that character.  All three Big Red Weirdos look like badly copied Chinese characters when turned upside down -- and do not look like anything plausible when looked "upside up".

This claim could do with some reevaluation: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

He didn’t study it. He learned it to speak, not to study. That’s the difference.

Sorry, I don't see the point.

I’m not arguing that the author might not have known what a particular plant looks like. But the point was that, according to your reasoning, the author didn’t understand the text at all. That is, he was simply recording sounds as they were dictated, without really understanding what he was writing.

No, that is not my claim at all!  He kept to his plan only because he could understand many of the words as they were spoken, and thus hoped that he would be able to understand at least some of his phonetic transcript when he went back to Europe.

Take the Red Rooster recipe, for example.  If he had a working knowledge of the spoken language, he must have understood all the syllables marked in green below, apart from possible homophones.  He surely could tell where each sub-entry started, and knew that what followed each 主 was a list of diseases or benefits.  What he probably did not understand right away were the two- or three-syllable compounds, like 下血闭, that comprise most of the items in the list, or the precise syntax of the items that are not just the name of a disease.
(A)    | 丹雄鸡：　　　　 |Red male chicken:
(A3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(A31)  | 　　（女人）　　　 |····(women)
(A311) | 　　　崩中，　　　|······sudden discharge,
(A312) | 　　　漏下，　　　|······drip-down,
(A313) | 　　　赤白沃。　　|······red and white discharges.
(A32)  | 　　补虚，　　　　|····stopping energy leaks,
(A33)  | 　　温中，　　　　|····warming the center,
(A34)  | 　　止血，　　　　|····stopping bleeding,
(A35)  | 　　通神，　　　　|····connecting with divine intelligence,
(A36)  | 　　杀毒，　　　　|····killing toxins,
(A37)  | 　　辟不祥。　　　|····warding off inauspiciousness
(B)    | 头：　　　　　　 |Head:
(B3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(B31)  | 　　杀鬼。　　　　|····killing ghosts.
©    | 肪：　　　　　　 |Fat:
(C3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(C31)  | 　　耳聋。　　　　|····ear deafness.
(D)    | 肠：　　　　　　 |Intestines:
(D3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(D31)  | 　　遗溺。　　　　|····involuntary urination.
(E)    | 肶胵裹黄皮：　　 |Gizzard lining yellow skin:
(E3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(E31)  | 　　泄利。　　　  |····diarrhea and dysentery.
(F)    | 屎白：　　　　　 |Excrement white:
(F3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(F31)  | 　　消渴，　　　  |····wasting-thirst,
(F32)  | 　　伤寒寒热。　  |····damage by cold with chills and fever
(G)    | 翮羽：　　　　　 |Quill feathers:
(G3)   | 　［主］　　　　   |··[Mainly for]
(G31)  | 　　下血闭。　　  |····discharging blood blockage.
(H)    | 鸡子：　　　　　 |Egg:
(H3)   | 　［主］　　　　　 |··[Mainly for]
(H31)  | 　　除　　　　　 |····eliminating
(H311) | 　　　热火疮，　　|······hot fire sores,
(H312) | 　　　痫痉；　　 |······epileptic convulsions.
(H4)   | 　［可作］　　　　 |··[Can be made into]
(H41)  | 　　虎魄。　　　　|····amber

VMS in your reasoning appears to be the result of some very intricate theory.

Rather, the result of a highly unusual process, very different from those that produced all other "European" Medieval manuscripts.  Not necessarily more intricate.

For example, Nan Madol [...] it is possible to find a rational explanation for why and how this was done.

And the Chinese Origin theory is just that... 

I dare say that it is much more rational than other theories that assume it is an encrypted book of heretic bathing techniques, or mechanically generated gibberish specifically designed to leave everybody suspicious that it was gibberish.

the theory continues with something like “but then the author suddenly became impoverished, got hold of some dirty scraps of parchment

It is a fact that the parchment was mostly offcuts of "reject" quality.  The "impoverished Author" theory is just the obvious deduction from that fact.  Otherwise, why would he use such bad vellum for a project of that magnitude?

found some impoverished orphaned children

It is obvious from the manuscript itself that the Scribe had no experience copying and illustrating books.  He did know how to operate a quill pen, and had a reasonably firm hand.  But he did not know that he should have scored guiding lines to keep the margins and baselines straight and evenly spaced.  He knew how to handle a straightedge and a compass, but could not divide a circle into four equal parts, or draw two lines perpendicular to each other.  Apparently his experience as artist was not more than a few doodles.

That lack of skill is consistent with the Author's financial stress: apparently he could not afford to hire a competent scribe.  I speculated that the scribe could be someone like an accountant or notary with cobwebs on his office door, or maybe a teenage nephew of the Author -- the latter on account of his fondness for the naked nymphs, and his apparent ignorance of the same.

But I never said "impoverished orphaned child", much less "children".  The drawings are not that bad.

his random letters

The letters were not "random".  You mean "unusual"?

they made so many mistakes in the text that we can’t read it!

That is not the reason.  We cannot read it because we still don't know the language, and for the last 100+ years we all have started with a fatally wrong deduction: "the drawings look European, thus the language must be European".

And when they were drawing scribbles, instead of the author’s drafts, they took their favorite European manuscripts or re‑drew them!”.

Again, this is a misstatement of the Chinese Origin theory.  

We don't know how detailed were the Author's instructions about the illustrations.  He could have sketched every detail of every illustration, including the nymphs' hats and the lobster legs.  Or he could have just written "copy the root of this plant from this sketch [attaching a cut-out of his draft for Pharma] and fill the rest with your imagination".

But, either way, we now know that many VMS illustrations (or details thereof) were copied from other European manuscripts that were popular at the time.  And we can see that many details got mangled in the copy (if they were not already mangled in the copies that they were copied from).  

There is nothing strange about that: many illustrations on Medieval manuscripts were copied from other manuscripts, possibly from memory, and many were often misinterpreted or unduly "improved" or "simplified" by the copyst.  Illustrators did not devise from scratch, for each illustration, what Sagittarius, Moses, or King Arthur may have looked like. 

Given what we can infer about the Scribe, above, it seems unlikely that he owned those source books.  But the Author must have been reasonably well educated, even if he was a just a merchant and not a scholar (see Marco Polo).  So most likely those source books were his, and he either copied those details himself, or gave the books to the Scribe for him to use as "inspiration".

Sometimes it seems to me that you’re just trying to explain absolutely everything using Chinese theory.

Well, of course, any origin theory must be consistent with everything we see in the VMS.

The Chinese Origin theory says that the VMS is a phonetic transcription of 4-5 East Asian books in some monosyllabic East Asian language.  So it inherently applies to the whole text (Some of the "atypical" text, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f66r, may have been comments or instructions added by the Author himself in the same language.  But that seems unlikely; he would probably have chosen Latin or his own language for that.  More likely, those atypical pages too were transcribed from the the original books.)

However, to be precise, the Chinese Origin theory only proposes to explain the text and inked figure outlines of the VMS as they were in ~1430, right after the Scribe did his job. It does not say anything about what happened after that.  

I have a few other  theories about the following 600 years, including the Late Painting theory, two successive Retracing theories (Global and Mastophilic), the Big Wipe theory for f116v, and the Book Switch and Forged Signature theories for what happened after the book got to Wilfrid.  

These theories are generally independent of the Chinese Origin theory; except that, if true, the Late Painting and Retracing theories imply that what we see today may be very different from what one would have seen in ~1430, and therefore very different from what the Author intended them.

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

This claim could do with some reevaluation: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Reevaluating: indeed, people have proposed several interpretations for each weirdo individually.  For instance, Aga sees a plow on that one you discuss, and the symbol for veterinary medicine in the smaller one next to it. 

But the "mangled upside-down Chinese character" theory applies to all three...

All the best, --stolfi

[rikforto]

This has been a fairly contentious issue:

He kept to his plan only because he could understand many of the words as they were spoken, and thus hoped that he would be able to understand at least some of his phonetic transcript when he went back to Europe.

At one point I was flatly shouted down for suggesting that this means the languages are mutually intelligible:

The mutual intelligibility of the written Sinitic languages is a key assumption of your entire understanding of the COT.

NO IT IS NOT.  It is absolutely irrelevant to it.

Granting that this may be partial intelligibility, the crux of the matter is unchanged! If you can speak one language and be understood in another, that is mutual intelligibility! It is a central assumption here, and certainly not "absolutely irrelevant".

We've since had someone with actual field expertise weigh in:

It is worse with Literary Chinese, where the phonology is decidedly unhelpful in understanding the text. This would be a trilingual endeavour between the speaker's topolect (Mandarin, in your assumption, I believe?), Literary Chinese prose (which has diverged considerably in grammar and is not readily understood by a listener), and the scribe. Dictating this isn't unheard of (e.g. Ministers would dictate Literary Chinese-medium messages to the Emperor, and the Hongwu Emperor did engage in this), but it is not considered realistic for anyone but the most educated of Chinese. It is hard to express just how important the characters themselves are in disambiguating Literary Chinese, lest you get lost in 其/期/齐/奇, 工/公/功/攻/宫/弓, or something like that. It is less ambiguous in Middle Mandarin, but still an extremely unusual situation. 

I think you may be missing the important point here:

yet not know characters. Shennong Bencao is Literary Chinese and being able to recite it and understand its contents means knowing the characters, or the spoken word would be nonsense.

The Dictator would of course be able to read the characters.  The premise of the Dictation Scenario is that the VMS Author could not read the characters, but had some level of fluency in the spoken language only. 

The point is that the characters cannot be extricated from the words meaningfully. Positing a "Dictator" to do the extrication "would be nonsense".

This next quote from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. requires some introduction because it uses unusual technical terms. First, glottographic, defined, "using visible marks to represent forms of a spoken language". This is contrasts with, second, semasiographic, which is more akin to what you posited when you suggested that characters record ideas directly: "visible marks to meaning directly without reference to any specific spoken language". He makes pretty plain that Classical Chinese is unusual for its relationship to spoken language:

There is, admittedly, a special consideration in the case of written Chinese which might seem to put its glottographic status in doubt.  Once a spoken language has acquired a written form, the two linguistic systems may evolve independently so that the relationship between written and spoken languages becomes increasingly remote.  With Chinese this happened in a way for which I know no parallel:  during much of recent history, before the reforms in written usage associated with the May Fourth Movement initiated in 1919, the standard written language of China (wen yan, or literary Chinese) was a language which when read aloud in contemporary pronunciation could not be understood by a hearer, irrespective of how learned he might be, because the spoken equivalent of a written text did not contain sufficient information to determine the identities of the morphemes of which the text was composed.  There were two reasons for this.  Sound changes during the long period since the creation of the script had removed many phonological contrasts and thus introduced an extremely high incidence of homophony among morphemes;You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and developments in literary usage had created many possibilities of meaningfully combining morphemes in writing in ways that would never have occurred in spoken Chinese at any period of its history, thus reducing the chance of determining the intended morpheme among a set of homophone candidates by reference to its morphemic environment.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  Therefore literary Chinese not merely did only function but could only function as a written and read language, not as a spoken and heard language.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  This might seem to bring literary Chinese within the definition of semasiography.  But any literary Chinese text has a perfectly specific spoken form, composed of morphemes many of which occur in modern spoken Chinese and all of which are etymologically identifiable with morphemes that have occurred in spoken Chinese at some historical period:  there is a well-defined way of reading a literary Chinese text aloud (morphemes which are obsolete in spoken Chinese are given the pronunciations that result by applying subsequent sound-laws to the pronunciations the morphemes had when they were current in speech), even if this activity achieves no communicative purpose.  [...]  Chinese script is glottographic.

Positing someone to do dictation or hollowly asserting that "The Author" could understand the same does not resolve the problem here.

[Stefan Wirtz_2]

But it is not just that character.  All three Big Red Weirdos look like badly copied Chinese characters when turned upside down -- and do not look like anything plausible when looked "upside up".[..]

I think it is safe to say that all three "big reds" are those few characters that are closest to the suspect of calligraphy.
For the "29" thing I remarked earlier that this might be even transferred from the previous page, due to humidity or water damage. Something like this happened to 2 plant's pages a bit later.

Calligraphic letters can be nearly unrecognizable even when knowing their basic characters.

So yes, could be head-down chinese signs; or just anything else.