The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

One of the weirdest things I did in my life was sitting for a couple of hours in a dusky library room in Prague, while outside the sun shone on countless touristic opportunities, copying by hand the biography of Jacobus Sinapius/Horcicki/Tepenecz from a hefty History of the Jesuits in Bohemia.  It was in Latin, and even though I recognized most of the words, I could not make sense of the text, because I know nothing about Latin cases and verb inflections.  My plan was to type my transcription, after I got back home, and post it to the VMS list, counting that someone else would translate it. 

The situation was not quite the same as that of the VMs Author in the Chinese theory, because I knew the script and was copying the text, instead of taking dictation.  But it must have been just as unfeasible for him to ask for a translation on the spot as it had been for me.  And his plan would have been similar to mine: "after I get back home..."

I suppose you copied a few pages in a script you understood (so this was a perfect copy) of a language that you certainly could somehow translate later. Sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

What the Author did, copying hundreds of pages (even if the herbal part is a "hoax", it's still a hundred pages left?), in an imperfect manner (there is no way one could perfectly copy a barely known language by ear) with uncertain hope of having it translated later, without even attempting to replicate some of the original script or add some notes, to me sounds like a really bad plan. Maybe it's possible to invent the circumstances under which this would be the only option.

an unambiguously Oriental fruit

There may be several of those in the Pharma and Herbal sections.  How can we say there aren't?

If there were, by the very definition of "unambiguously" we would have known by now   A lot of botanists checked the MS, I'm not sure how many non-disputed plants are there, certainly not one that would be called "unambiguously Oriental/non-European", otherwise this would be big news.

My point was generally, why from a long list of Oriental imagery or symbolism that could have made it into the MS, there is not a single unambiguous example. If the goal of the Author was spreading/recording knowledge, I think one of the things she or he would be keen on doing was reproducing some of the images as accurately as possible.

if the folios are supposed to be read upside down

That is not what I meant at all! Only the big red weirdos would be upside-down, because they are the only characters that the author copied and could not tell that they were upside-down.  The Voynichese text is definitely to be read as we read it, and all the figures that had an obvious orientation are correctly oriented. 

How likely is it that The Author witnessed the Reader read hundreds of pages from a book, but failed to notice which way the book was normally held, nor got any hint from the images? And then put these symbols as if they were paragraph initials in the transcription for some reason? Again, it is possible, anything physically possible is possible, but overall this sounds like very strange reasoning on the part of the Author.

Still, it is remarkable that there are so few repetitions, and each occurs only twice.  Hopefully someone has already investigated this question in more detail...

There are lots of repetitions of shorter labels. These are the top 5-6 character labels:

8x  otedy
8x  otaly
5x  otchdy
5x  okeody
5x  okary
5x  okaly
4x  otoly
4x  oteedy
4x  okody
4x  okedy

IIRC this case is typical of most labels: their occurrences are consistent with them being names of the things next to them in the figures.  The exceptions may be non-specific labels, such as numbers or qualifiers ("main", "big", "upper", "hot", ...)

I still think if there was any consistency in the labels at all, we'd have a partially deciphered MS by now.

I can't imagine how a "language agnostic" decipherment attempt could produce more than a few isolated hints about the contents of the VMs.  For instance, from the above otcheody example we may guess that the labels in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. diagrams and in the Zodiac pages are indeed the names of specific astronomical stars.  But what can we get beyond that?

I'm not very familiar with these attempts wrt the Voynich MS. One example is the deciphering of the Rohonc codex. As far as I understand, the whole deciphering, which is considered plausible by many, was done by attempting to identify the meaning from the context. Maybe Rafal can comment on this one.

As far as I understand, one would start by identifying the most likely meaning of 5-6 repeating labels, then look for combinations of these words in the text of the MS and try identifying more vocabulary. And then proceed iteratively. To my knowledge there have been attempts like this for the Voynich MS, none of them looked very successful.