Unexpected languages

[ChenZheChina]

Zhe, on the topic of unexpected languages, as a native Chinese, do you have an opinion on the historical likelihood of a Chinese language underlying Voynichese? It is theoretically possible since Eurasia was interconnected long before the 15th century, but on the other hand it would probably be unparalleled.

Hi Koen,

In my opinion, if we want to say that Chinese, especially Mandarin Chinese, is the language underlying, there are two things we have to explain:

The first thing is grammatical. The heavy usage of prefixes qo- and o- makes it look less like Chinese.

There do are some prefixes in Chinese, such as the ordinal number prefix dì- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Modern orthography requires the ordinal prefix to be written as a hyphen-connected prefix (see section 4.6.3 of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), so that 第一 “first” is written as dì-yī, different than 地衣 “lichen” dìyī. However, Pinyin orthography is never taught in schools, and is mainly used only in textbooks for language educations, not for native speakers. I think a native speaker, if they were to invent their own orthography, would totally write such prefixes without hyphen.

Prefixes that may be written either as prefix or standalone (if they do not know the modern orthography) also include:

• 副 “vice-”, 总 “chief-”, 全 “total, all”, 半 “half, semi-”, 泛 “pan-”
  
• 不 “not-”, 非 “non-”, 无 “no-, -free”, 反 “anti-”, 可 “-able”, 超 “super-, hyper-, ultra-”
  
• 小 “dimunitive”, 老 “vocative for elder person (informal)”, 阿 “vocative for young person”, 大 “informal vocative”
  
• 这 “this”, 那 “that”
  
• 本 “this, our, current”, 该 “aforementioned”, 我 “our”, 你 “your”
  
• 各 “every-”, 每 “per-”, 某 “some-”
  
• 很 “very”, 更 “more- (comparative)”, 最 “most- (superlative)”
  
• 在 “at, in (usually location or organization)”, 向 “towards”, 为 “for”, 从 “since”, 于 “at, in, on (usually time)”
  
• maybe more...
  

Modern Pinyin orthography requires some of prefixes above to be written standalone, some to be written as prefix. However, for native speakers who are not aware of the orthography, it is totally possible to write either way.

However, I wonder if any of these prefixes could be as frequent as Voynichese qo- or o-.

Among these prefixes, only two are one-vowel-only: 阿 ā [a55] “vocative” and 于 yú [y35] “at, in, on”. 我 “our” in Modern Standard Chinese is wǒ [uo214] and contains two vowels, but might be pronounced as simply ǒ [o] some times in the past or somewhere. But again, in normal texts, they might not appear so frequent as Voynichese o-.

So this is the first thing we have to explain.

This is long, so I’ll put the second thing in the next post.