The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

First, in that proposal, the Author wrote down what some local Reader was dictating.  At that point, there would be no time to add notes to the transcript.

But, more importantly, the Author had only a limited knowledge of the language.   As a foreigner who got there as an adult, he probably knew enough of the (spoken) language to order food, ask the way to the bathroom, negotiate purchases, shipments, bribes, ... So he probably could not understand most of the contents of those books, and would have no useful notes to add.  

Any arrangement is possible, but overall it looks extremely weird that the Author concentrated on recording the sounds of incomprehensible speech instead of trying to figure out the meaning by discussing it with the Reader and translating or at least annotating it on the go. The Reader was probably an educated person, being able to read in the XV century.

One scenario that would look somewhat plausible to me, is if the initiator of the whole process was the Reader and not the Author. So, certain Oriental scientist wanted to spread their teachings to the world and being unfamiliar with the Latin script and understanding that the local logographic script would take too much time to teach, decided on inventing a simple phonetic alphabet that would be easy to the European pupil to write down with a quill. Then insisted that the whole book was written this way without any barbarian Latin scribbles, to be able to verify that the message is properly recorded.

What images would there be in the images in the books that the author presumably would choose to transcribe?  Unidentifiable plants and plant parts -- check.  Incomprehensible  astronomical diagrams -- check.  Organs of the human body -- check.  What else?

For example, a single word written in the original Oriental script, a sample of Oriental characters, a few numbers in the original number system, an unambiguously Oriental object, fruit, utensil. I understand, that the Scribe had to recreate images from imperfect sketches, but generally the Scribe had no problem drawing things that he never witnessed (like the Scorpio or the Dragon - which looks like a European dragon to me), so why are there no images showing likely Oriental objects?

Also, Chinese books were bound on the right side.  Now turn page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. upside down, so that the binding is on the right side.  What do you see?

Sorry, I don't like riddles. I know, it sounds ironic. I see a manuscript upside down. I remember from a while ago, that the red weirdos are supposed to look like some Chinese characters, but personally I don't see a lot of similarity between the red weirdos and properly written 兀 or 几, if that's the proposed reading. Also, if the folios are supposed to be read upside down, then we have to conclude that the nymphs and plants were likely imported from Australia. Sorry for being a bit snarky, but there is more than enough ambiguity and uncertainty in the Voynich Manuscript itself for me to want some more on top 

IIRC, the labels are mostly all distinct; and when a label occurs in the text, it is usually near its occurrence in the figures.  Isn't that so?

Not to my knowledge. As far as I remember, there are quite a few repeated labels, including relatively long ones, and absolutely none of them make any obvious sense. If my greps are correct, these are the repeating labels of 7+ characters:

2x  otcheody
2x  otaraldy
2x  otaldar
2x  otalaiin
2x  olkeedal
2x  okolShy
2x  okeey.ary
2x  oeeodaiin
2x  cheoldy

If we include 6 character labels, there are some that repeat 5 times. If each label meant the same thing each time it appeared, there would have been very plausible explanations by now. I don't know, maybe the labels are not words but references ("fig. 1").

EDIT: I don't know if they preferably appear close in the text. I took the first label in the list above and tried to find it in the transcription:

Code:

<f68r1.10,@Ls>    otcheody <f68r3.22,@Cc>    <!09:30>otcheody.chokchy.okol.cheol.dar.cho.keol.dolaiin.okeol.oly <f72v3.6,&Lz>    <!00:30>otcheody <f114v.31,+P0>    olaiin.cheo.otcheody.lkchedy.okol.okaiin.otaiin.otal.qotar

It appears fairly close once in a circular inscription and once more in a completely different part of the manuscript.

There are attempts like this a few times a year, but they quickly break down, because there is no consistency in labels and how the same words are used in the text.

Yes, there have been many such attempts.  But most of them failed because their strategy was 

  1. use those image clues to identify the meaning of a few words, 
  2. guess the language, 
  3. using 1 and 2, determine the encoding, 
  4. using 3, decode the rest of the text 

As far as I know, there have been a few language agnostic manual and computational attempts, trying to ascribe meaning to various sequences of characters based on context. Some of them looked a bit naïve, some more sophisticated. I didn't study them in depth, but I know that so far they failed to produce anything convincing for the public.