The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Either you learn the original script, or you use the script you know to represent the sounds of the foreign language. [...] there is no way that Voynichese would have been the spontaneous result of Latins representing a foreign language in a more accessible way.

That is not an absolute fact; it depends on the goal of the script's inventor.

I would say that, in general, when someone creates a script for a language A that is based on the script of a language B, the goal is either to bring the speakers of A into the cultural sphere of B, or teach the spoken language A to many speakers of B.

An example of the former goal is the creation of the modern Turkish alphabet by Atatürk, based on the Latin alphabet with a few sound changes and some diacritics (and treating the dot on the "i" as a diacritic).  It was part of his goal of bringing Turkey out of the "Arab" sphere and into the "European" one.  Other examples are the alphabets created by the Soviets for many non-IE languages, based on cyrilic.   Another example is the pre-Atatürk Turkish script and the Farsi script, both based on the Arabic script, which were part of the inclusion of Turkey and Persia into the Islamic sphere.

Examples of the second goal are the scripts invented by Christian missionaries for Mandarin, Vietnamese, Quechua, Maya, Nahuatl, Guarani, etc..  Their goal was to train missionaries who could be able to preach and convert in those languages.  Thus staying as close as possible to the Latin script was an obvious necessity.  Ditto for the Esperanto script.

But when neither of these goals exist, new scripts are often invented from scratch, without any attempt to imitate any script that was familiar to the inventor or to other speakers  of the language.  Saint Mesrop was familiar with the Greek and Latin scripts, and probably also Hebrew and Arabic; but the alphabet he designed for Armenian has practically no similarity with any of these, except a couple of letters.    The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. syllabary resembles Chinese characters in the shapes of the strokes, but it is not a modification of the Chinese script.   Japanese hiragana and katakana, as well as Korean hangul, are similarly (not) based on the scripts known by the creators and their intended audience.  The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are another example.  And the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is another.

And, according to the "Chinese theory" as I outlined before, the Author of the VMS di not have any of those two goals.  So his choice of a totally different alphabet, rather than a Latin-based one, is not at all unreasonable.  As noted before, the Voynichese script seems to have been designed with writing speed as the main goal.