The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

Back to Red Rooster recipe: if the local language that the Author could speak was modern Mandarin (which it totally wasn't, but just suppose), this is what the Dictator would have said out loud, reading the SBJ from the ZHB:

dān xióng jī: zhǔ: (nǚ rén) bēng zhōng, lòu
xià, chì bái wò. bǔ xū, wēn zhōng, zhǐ xuè,
tōng shén, shā dú, bì bù xiáng. tóu: zhǔ: shā
guǐ. fáng: zhǔ: ěr lóng. cháng: zhǔ: yí nì.
pí chī guǒ huáng pí: zhǔ: xiè lì. niào bái:
zhǔ: xiāo kě, shāng hán hán rè. hé yǔ: zhǔ:
xià xuè bì. jīzǐ: zhǔ: chú rè huǒ chuāng,
diān jìng; kě zuò: hǔ pò.

The Author probably understood correctly the words in green, because (IIUC) they are all common words like "red", "male", "chicken", "mainly", "woman", "red", "white", "blood", etc.  The others seem to be mostly medical terms that I suppose he would not have learned even after living for years in the place.

And much of that text is 2-3 syllable compound terms whose meaning he probably did not know, even if he got the meaning of the individual syllables.  He probably understood niào (excrement) and bái (white), but he may have not have figured out that niào bái mean the white part of chicken poo, which is mostly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  

According to the SBJ, niào bái is a treatment for xiāo kě.  He may have understood both syllables -- xiāo = "extinguish, consume" and kě = "thirst"; but he probably would not have known that the pair did not mean "satiate thirst", but rather "wasting thirst" -- which my lalamo says is "diabetes".  So recording [his idea of] the translation, instead of the sound, would have been an error that could not be fixed later.

So.. when the VMS author read their shiny new phonetic script out loud .. they wouldn't understand hardly any of the important medical words? Having a perfect phonetic transcription (which is extremely unlikely) would also have been basically useless back in the west, unless you bought a local back with you to interpret what you say. So I still don't understand the how this voynichese text would have been useful in any meaningful way. 

And if the answer to this is that saying the words out loud would help him remember the spoken word and it's meaning, he must have had the meaning explained to him anyway.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Well, the VMS itself is a highly unusual Medieval manuscript.

I see its uniqueness, probably in its individual and rather careless style. But otherwise, for me, the VMS style is not much different from an ordinary school notebook.

It is uniqueness is mostly in the script and in the structure and statistics of the text.

But it is also seems to be unique in several details of the illustrations, 

• The plant drawings.  According to Baresch, the doctors in Prague could not recognize them.  While the Alchemists´ Herbal (AH) also has non-existent plants, and some of them may have been coped into the VMS, the VMS herbal section as a whole is not simply another copy of the AH.
  
• The Zodiac with 30 (always 30) named "things" per sign.
  
• The Nine-Rosette fold-out.
  
• Some of the Astro/Cosmo diagrams, divided into odd numbers of sectors (like f67v1 with 17 sectors, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with 28 "Logs", f70r1 with 9 "mouths", the 4x17 sequence of f57v.  Also the "spiral arms" on f68v3. 
  
• The bizarre "tubs", "pipes", and "organs" in some Bio pages.
  
• The labeled jars on the margin of the Pharma section.
  
• The fact that the vast majority of the human figures is naked little women in mostly stereotypical poses.  Also the hats and "tubs" or "barrels" of the Zodiac nymphs.
  
• The marginalia in Latin letters and in a different but equally mysterious language.
  

We now know that several details were copied from other European books, apparently without understanding.  But the variety of these sources itself seems to be rather unique.

[The lack of scored margin and base lines] can be explained by the fact that the author had no reason to write in huge Gothic letters and to carefully craft each letter. He had no reason to put in the effort.

What I mean is that a professional book copyist wold have used scored guide lines by default.  Just like a professional wall painter would use spackle and masking tape, without the client having to ask for them.  Even with the same handwriting and letter size, it would result in a much nicer book.

A more experienced scribe would also plan the space better, so that the Zodiac nymphs would end up evenly spaced (without those "overflow" nymphs at the top), the plant roots would not extend into the bottom margin, etc.

Chinese theory truly explains only the text and the red symbols. The rest is in question (including astrology with European features).

The Chinese Origin theory includes the claim that the physical BL MS 408 was scribed in Europe by an European Scribe, on European vellum, based on a draft provided by the Author, with the illustrations partly specified by the draft, partly "inspired" on other European manuscripts, partly invented by the Scribe on his own.   

So it does explain the illustrations too.

All the best, -- stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Again, this assumes homophone disambiguation, which is the entire ballgame here.

Sigh.

In the proposed scenario, the Dictator was asked to read the SBJ in the local language, possibly the only East Asian language which the Author could understand.  If that language had been modern Mandarin, the Dictator could just have said "dān xióng jī".  The Author would then have written down the sounds "dān xióng jī" in his phonetic notation. 

And that is it.  Why is this so hard to understand?

Again, everything else you wrote and quoted may be correct, but it is totally irrelevant. 

If the local language had been Spanish, the Dictator could have said literally "rojo macho galina", or may have tried to finesse the local grammar and said "roja macha galina" or "galina macha roja" or "rojo galo" or "galo rojo"; and the Author still could have written down what he said.  Or the Dictator may have said any of the above, and the Author, having understood that those words meant "red rooster", may have written any other version.  

And there are indeed signs of such occasional "non-literal" readings in the SPS.  On the corresponding parag, f105v.32, the Voynichese title is just poar.keeo - only 8 EVA letters instead of the expected 15.  That could still be three syllables -- po, ar, keeo -- that happen to be all shorter than average.  But maybe the local language had a single-syllable word for rooster, and that is how the Dictator read 雄鸡. 

I already mentioned that 血 occurs twice in that recipe, as 止血 = "stop bleeding" and 血闭 = "blood blockage", less literally "amenorrhea" (skipped menstruation); but there there is no word in parag f105v.32 that repeats exactly at the right places.  It could be that the Author wrote the syllable for 血 as oteey the first time and ockhey the second time. (See the "buffalos" of Lewis and Clark.)  Or that the Scribe misread the Author's handwriting.  But, based on tentative matching of other recipes, it may also be that the Dictator read 血闭 as a specific word or compound that means "amenorrhea" and does not contain the syllable for "blood".

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Only if you are willing to overlook 99% of the text

What do you mean?  

Unlike the theories based on the European Origin theory, the COT satisfactory explains the nature of the script, and the structure and statistics of the words, over the whole text.   Not just how they got that way, but also the why that was "how".

[Only if you] accept that the big red weirdos are a a good match (they are not, even upside down)...

Again, while there have been proposed explanations for individual weirdos, the "upside down badly copied Chinese characters" is still a competitive explanation for all three.

All the best, --stolfi.

[ololololo]

It is uniqueness is mostly in the script and in the structure and statistics of the text.

The uniqueness lies in the fact that it is the only such manuscript — I agree with that. But its style is not unique or particularly special. It’s simply careless.

[DG97EEB]

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There's a whole load of SBSs on here but I don't have Baidu to access them... 45gb, Jorge...every edition

[rikforto]

Sorry, we absolutely have to get bogged down in this for a bit because if this in any way represents your understanding of how to read Chinese it is completely and wildly wrong:

If the local language had been Spanish, the Dictator could have said literally "rojo macho galina", or may have tried to finesse the local grammar and said "roja macha galina" or "galina macha roja" or "rojo galo" or "galo rojo"; and the Author still could have written down what he said.

A reading is a conventionalized way of assigning sound and meaning bundles to text. I am going to engage with this speculatively soon enough, but there is no convention for reading Chinese characters in Spanish. Claims about how someone would read them "in Spanish" require inventing a literary culture that does not exist, has never existed, and if we speculate existed we have no direct data for. If the local language had been Spanish, there would have been no way to read the text in Spanish because you cannot read Chinese in Spanish anymore than you can read an obscure German dialect in phonetic Irish.

This does explain something that has vexed me for some months on your You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.---why you have "readings" for non-Sinosphere languages. Thai, Tibetan, and Burmese do not have character readings because they have never conventionalized a way of reading Chinese. There is simply no way to check if your LLM has returned correct values for those "readings" because there is no data to compare it to and so no way to say what is right or wrong. There is just a simple absence of a way to read the characters. This differs from the Mandarin, Cantonese, first Vietnamese, and Bai examples on the site. Best as I can tell---and they are listed in the order of my confidence here---those are largely correctly done readings. The non-examples seem to be trying to follow this mode, but have pulled a different kind of data. Exactly what is hard for me to say because I'm a Sinosphere guy---but that's the point. This is outside my realm precisely because those are not readings of the characters and I have no resources for engaging with them that way. You might as well ask me how to read Bengali in Greek for all the sense the question makes.

A thing I want to stress here is that the valid examples of readings are not strictly "in Mandarin" and so on. They are lists of Mandarin (and so on) pronunciations of the characters that have been conventionalized for reading Classical Chinese. They do not carry their Mandarin (and so on) meaning because the text is in Classical Chinese but for when the course of the linguistic river of these words has remained unchanged for the last 2500 years. Strategies for disambiguating syllables that work in spoken Mandarin (and so on) will fail here because the Mandarin (and so on) context is absent. Placing "xióng" and "jī" next to each other does not result in the Mandarin word for rooster or suggest the proper meanings for "xióng" and "jī" based on Mandarin (and so on) as outlined above.

You have scoffed at the idea that the way those readings are selected is by etymology rather than by translation, but indeed, that is the case. (I probably muddied the water a bit by saying "cognation" previously, which is unambiguously accurate for Chinese, and not unambiguously wrong for the intense relexification that happened in JKV languages and arguably amounts to creolization. At any rate, if you prefer "etymologically", that's what I mean.) This is the way the Spanish example fails the hardest. The etymological term for 丹 does not exist in Spanish because Spanish did not ingest the Chinese lexicon and develop a literary culture around the characters. Had it, Spanish would have borrowed a word for cinnabar (the better gloss for 丹) in the ballpark of /*dan/. It would probably use it in compounds of Chinese origin, but continue to use /cinabrio/ as the unbound form. This, at least, is the default pattern in JKV languages. Likewise, the expectation would be that both Sino-Spanish /*dan/ and native Spanish /cinabrio/ would be written 丹, but they would be separate words available in separate contexts that could be unambiguously recovered from writing. It is rare, but not vanishingly so, for a proficient reader of a passage of well-formed Japanese to have any doubt if one is looking at the Sinitic or Japonic word, and dictionaries and textbooks overtly track which is which by etymology for learning and reference. Regardless, the passage in question is not in Spanish, it is in Classical Chinese. If the Classical Chinese text were read aloud as your examples, the first word would not be expected to be /rojo/ or /cinabrio/, as they are from the wrong etymology stream, but the etymologically related term, fictitiously posited to be /*dan/. There are practices of semi-translation, especially in Japan and Korea, but they quickly run into the problems of full translation outlined below as they too would result in marked changes to the corresponding text in the VMS and those remarks apply here.

This again all applies directly to the Thai, Burmese, and Tibetan "readings". Your LLM has constructed them very differently because, like Spanish, there is no lexicon to draw from when constructing the reading. In Sinosphere languages you wouldn't usually draw from the native terms, but rather the Sinitic ones, except of course in Sinitic languages, where native terms are Sinitic. This, by the way, is how you decide if a language is the Sinosphere or not. If the characters have local readings, it is a Sinosphere language.

To belabor the point and return to actual, attested linguistic practice there is a bit of a shell game happening here, though I don't believe you are doing it on purpose to deceive. You are recovering the sense from the Classical Chinese text with the characters disambiguating meaning. You then assign that word (not character, word) an English gloss. You then assigning the character a Mandarin phonology. You are then taking the English gloss from the Classical Chinese as previously recovered with the disambiguating characters, and applying it to the Mandarin phonology to argue The Author would recognize it. Less transparent to me is how you are getting the green text in the aforementioned passage; You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is obsolete in most standalone uses in Standard Chinese. But taking all those LLM identifications at face value, just because the character still knocking around in some other use, that doesn't mean it would be readily disambiguated from the other You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.; or worse, just because "dan" is common in pinyin transcriptions that doesn't mean they all reflect 丹.

This places your arguments on a fork. On the one hand, you can argue that the characters were read character-by-character, in a conventionalized way. This has the benefit of creating a verifiable text that can be analyzed and commented on, and a lot of my remarks are predicated on the idea that you have found the plain text. This has the downsides that Shira and I have raised---Classical Chinese does not correspond on a character-by-character basis with the spoken languages of the 1400s, to the point it was not comprehensible when read aloud even to people who could read the text. This would result in a VMS with, to paraphrase Sampson lightly, a text that serves no communicative purpose.

On the other hand you can abandon this view and take on translation. This has the upside that it restores one of the features of the Dictation Scenario, that The Author would be able to recognize words. But it wreaks havoc on both the matching process you have proposed and the text you have created for that matching. I've had less to say about this for two reasons. First, you've tended towards the first view; you've said it looks character-by-character and your concrete examples are constructed that way. Second, it is much harder to falsify. "The VMS could match any arbitrarily altered plain text" is trivially true, but without those alterations clearly laid out, we don't learn much from it.

So unwinding back from the Spanish example, we get to this:

In the proposed scenario, the Dictator was asked to read the SBJ in the local language, possibly the only East Asian language which the Author could understand.  If that language had been modern Mandarin, the Dictator could just have said "dān xióng jī".  The Author would then have written down the sounds "dān xióng jī" in his phonetic notation. 

If we suppose the local language was Mandarin, that's not spoken Mandarin Chinese! Far from not understanding the proposed scenario, I followed down the claim you made and checked to see if, in fact, the process that your LLM gave you was indeed "in Mandarin Chinese". It was not! You will find the same true for most major varieties of Chinese with the exception of Wu Chinese and a few backwater dialects of others, mostly under Wu Shanghainese influence. (Positing Shanghainese will not solve this problem in the abstract; it will turn out to be innovative on something the prominent spoken Mandarin languages turn out to conserve because that's how language divergence works.)

A "Dictator" doesn't solve these problems because the problems I'm raising aren't based on recovering phonology from the characters! They are about recovering meaning from the phonology. Even in the patently incorrect view that the characters "directly represent concepts", the phonology does not make those concepts available to The Author so arguments that make recourse to them are invalid! You cannot smuggle the information from the characters through separate English glosses and reunite them and call it "the local language". This becomes completely untenable when you acknowledge that Chinese languages (plural) are not streams of disconnected ideographic symbols, but fully realized, contextually understood languages. The phrase "xióng jī" is absent from colloquial Beijing Mandarin because while the morphemes persist, convention does not allow them to combine to form "rooster". Like a lot of linguistic facts this cannot be known a priori; it simply is the way the language conventionally works; Shanghainese demonstrates the road not taken. The problem here is not endogenous to the dictation scenario; the problem is that predictions made by it (namely: the author could understand the words) are not supported by exogenous linguistic evidence.

To lean a bit on the Latin metaphor, I could posit that the VMS was written by a Chinese man in Europe who learned the local language but could not be bothered to learn the Latin alphabet and invented his own. (I recognize this is a much less tempting thing to do when an alphabet is right there, and the analogy fails here. The other points stand.) That language could be any of the many Latin languages of Europe---Spanish, Italian, English, Basque, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., etc. It would not matter because they You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. By listening to a reading of the Tractatus de Herbis in, say, the Spanish pronunciation of Latin You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.mYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., he would be able to write down the phonological values and understand it later. I could then insist failure to understand this is a failure to understand the Dictation Scenario, not a problem with how my thought experiment interfaces with reality. 

I would be devoured alive in the comments here if I went down this road!

Not for nothing, when I laid out a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. version of this sort of dictation practice transparently in an alphabet with familiar languages, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., gave quite harsh reviews. I tend to agree with the criticism for the languages in question, but it reflects normal practices in the Sinosphere! So ironically this reaction is an overcorrection, but a revealing one. Workhorse features of the kind of Sinosphere dictation you have illustrated to back your claims look wrong to you when you have have the linguistic context to see what is actually happening. When they are Romance languages, you recognize the fork I laid out above and resolve it by insisting on freer translation.

This has been entirely too many words to point out that reading the wrong language out loud and calling it a different language does not transmute it into that other language! It is technically feasible that the VMS is dictation of a dead language in a mode that wasn't comprehensible to anyone, but you cannot then assume it was a living language comprehensible to some traveler and fault me, as your critic, for noticing they are two different things. You can insist all you want that Classical Chinese terms are Mandarin, but actual Chinese lexicographers get the decisive say here and they do not agree with your thought experiment! This has bearing if you want to make claims about what The Author did and did not understand from your proposed text alignment

[Jorge_Stolfi]

A reading is a conventionalized way of assigning sound and meaning bundles to text. I am going to engage with this speculatively soon enough, but there is no convention for reading Chinese characters in Spanish. Claims about how someone would read them "in Spanish" require inventing a literary culture that does not exist, has never existed, and if we speculate existed we have no direct data for.

Well, you see, I am assuming that the Dictator had a functioning brain.  A device that had been invented a few centuries before, and I gather was in widespread use in China and adjacent countries by the time when that scenario is supposed to have happened.

So, when the Dictator saw the character 鸡, he did NOT say whatever @rickforto and his army of linguists say he categorically should have said to stay within the sacred bounds of the literary culture bla bla bla bla.

He would have said the word for "chicken" in the local language.  

Because he knew that that is what the Author needed, and had asked for.   He knew that if he had read out the SBJ in Middle Mandarin or in whatever was the local pseudo-Chinese they normally used, it would be the same as reading it in Yakut or  Proto-Basque or Etruscan -- it would have made the effort totally pointless.

Why is that so hard to understand?

By the way, I don't recall whether you ever answered this question: do you really believe that the sounds that the scholars would have uttered when reading the SBJ aloud in 1400 CE were the same sounds that the author of the SBJ would have uttered if he was asked to read his book aloud, in ~300 BCE?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

... you haven’t managed to convince the masses yet, and that would make me suspicious ... so many others are anything but convinced. Are they all stupid?

Of course not.  Bayes explains.  They are all so convinced that the language must be European (or gibberish, or some non-linguistic code) that they will dismiss any evidence to the contrary -- for any nit they can find, or even without looking at the evidence at all.

Which has long been my own reaction to, for example, claims that "the VMS is gibberish".  Even since before I found the SBJ.

That atttude is quite sensible and justifiable.  Someone may say that, ideally, a Scientist should never dismiss a claim without understanding and checking the evidence that is presented with it.  But in practice one must always estimate (even just unconsciously) the expected cost/benefit of doing that.  Namely Prob(claim is true) x (benefit)  - Prob(claim is false) x (cost). The cost being the time wasted checking the evidence, the benefit is correcting one's mistaken belief, and Prob(X) is your probability that X holds.   If your first Prob() is small enough, that formula will yield a net cost.

The biggest problem with people is that they’re all so incredibly convinced of their convictions.

Indeed...

All the best, --stolfi

[JoJo_Jost]

That’s ONE point of view, which, for example, doesn’t apply to me at all. 

I don’t care at all what it is—Latin, Chinese, German, Russian, Hawaiian etc... , an unknown language, a made-up language, or a hoax—if someone can convince me, I’d be very happy to know the answer.

But so far, you haven’t really done that. I consider the Chinese version a possibility, but unlike you, I find the evidence rather weak—at least for now...

As I said before: Convince us with more matches and details.