The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[nablator]

These are more consistent with a poorly done imitation/parody/fake than an honest transliteration of a language.

"consistent with a fake" maybe, but not "poorly done" ...
If the VM is the result of some sort of "gibberish-generating process", it is a a surprisingly complex process for its time, with a clever mix of rules and randomness !

Clever yes, but naïve, without control of even the most basic statistics like frequencies of glyphs and their bi-grams, tri-grams, let alone more advanced statistics like MATTR, word pair correlation, etc. I'm sure a Chi² test would be interesting on these basic statistics: I don't remember if a study has done exactly that and compared with real historical texts, to show just how weird these statistics are in the VM.

It is not Chinese for the same reason that it is not any transliteration or simple substitution cipher of any language: Voynichese is not flat.

Even back in 1962, Elizebeth Friedman – having been a top US Government code-breaker for several decades – was able to note that all attempts to decrypt the Voynich Manuscript as if it were a simple language or single-substitution alphabet were “doomed to utter frustration”. That is, if you wind the clock back half a century from the present day, it was already clear then that Voynichese’s curious lack of flatness was strongly incompatible with:
* natural languages
* exotic languages
* lost languages
* monoalphabetic (simple) substitution ciphers, and even
* straightforward hoaxes

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