The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[ReneZ]

There is a certain amount of déjà vu in this 

And there is no reason to assume, even within the "Chinese" theory, that Voynichese was Mandarin.

Absolutely. Nowadays Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible but I understand that they originate from a common ancestor. I have tried to find out more about that, in particular how it was around the 15th century, but did not find very much. The main point remains that there are indeed very many monosyllabic languages from that part of the world.

In the example I gave using daiin and chol, I used Mandarin because I know bits and pieces of it, and it is easy to verify for people who are interested.

Transcriptions of tonal languages that omit tones are usually limited to person and place names, or isolated words like "feng shui" and "kung fu".  It would be totally pointless to transcribe whole sentences that way.

While that sounds completely logical, reality can be quite different. The official romanisation of Thai does not write out any tone information. People also sometimes refer to 'Karaoke language' which is more freely romanised Thai but still without tones. While that is OK for Thai, it might not work with Mandarin. 

When I wrote before...

An alphabetic writing system for Thai arose in the 15th century, according to tradition.
This only indicated tones in specific cases.

... I was referring to the official Thai writing like this: ภาษาไทย

For this language, the tones can be inferred from the spelling, using quite intricate rules, so it is certainly a special case.

On this page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I have one example from a Romanised Chinese language or dialect (Minjiang) about which I know nothing specific. It has a low entropy, but not a comparable bigram distribution to Voynichese.