The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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.

Some of the "bumpiness" features listed by Nick seem to affect a relatively small fraction of the text, and (like transcription errors, or missing fragments on clay tablets) should not be a big obstacle to decipherment.  

It is almost certain now that one-leg gallows are variants of the two-leg gallows, possibly combined with e or other letters, that are used mostly on the first line of a paragraph -- a convention that the Author picked up from the typical European manuscript style.   When single-leg gallows occur inside a parag, I would guess that the Scribe failed to see a parag break in the Author's draft and thus started the first line of the second parag as continuation of the last line of the previous one.   I don't see reason to ascribe any other meaning to single-leg gallows, just as I don't think that split two-leg gallows or fancy decoration on gallows have any linguistic or semantic value.

Some, if not all, of the free-standing columns of letters are likely to be the work of later owners, and thus should be ignored.

The peculiar features at the "margins" of the pages can have banal explanations too.  For one thing, on many languages the final letters or words of a sentence may be strongly affected by the topic.  In a narrative of past events, sentences are more likely to end with "-ed" in English, with "-ta" in Japanese; whereas in a herbal the sentences should be mostly in the present tense, hence  more likely to end with "-desu" or "-masu" in Japanese.  

Others have pointed out the increased use of abbreviations at end of lines in European manuscripts.  And, based on the few "classical" texts I have looked at, narratives in Hebrew and Ge'ez (and presumably Arabic) will often start a sentence with "Ve/We/Wa" (= "And").