The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

I am not so sure that, if this were a more-or-less straight rendition of some East-Asian language, it would have been solved by now. I do agree with Stolfi that essentially nobody is following this approach, and the possibilities are simply too many.

I'm not sure how to estimate the global effort spent on the Voynich MS. The manuscript has been a hot topic for many years, and considering the research history, I suspect quite a few enthusiasts from academia prefer for it to be their quiet hobby project and not their officially known pastime. The scans and transliterations are freely available. I think we can say there are at least a few researchers from most countries that individually attempted to investigate the Voynich MS.

Now, a simple experiment. I think this: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the book that Prof. Stolfi referred to as a possible source of the Voynich MS. If it's not, this doesn't really affect my reasoning.

I used Google Translate to transcribe a few paragraphs into pinyin. Again, this is not the Classical Chinese and it's certainly not a perfect transcription, but my point is more general: this is some phonetic transcription of a scientific book in some eastern language. Then I found the longest substrings that repeat at least 3 times (this is not even the whole first page of the MS), they are below in the uppercase:

shàng YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi jūn zhǔ yǎng mìng yǐ yìng tiān wúdú duō fú jiǔ fú bù shāng rén yù qīng shēn yì qì bùlǎo yán nián zhě běn shàng jīng zhōngYÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi chén zhǔ yǎngxìng yǐ yìng rén wúdú yǒudú zhēnzhuó qí yí yù è bìng bǔ xū léi zhě běn zhōng jīng xiàYÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍwǔ zhǒng wèi zuǒ shǐ zhǔ zhì bìng yǐ yīng de duō dú bùkě jiǔ fú yù chú hánrè xiéqì pò jījù yù jí zhě běn xià jīng yào yǒu jūnchénzuǒshǐ yǐ xiāng xuān shè héhé zhě yí yòng yī jūn èr chén wǔ zuǒ yòu kè yī jūn sān chén jiǔ zuǒ shǐ yě yào yǒuyīnyáng pèihé zǐ mǔ xiōngdì gēnjīng huā shí cǎo shí gǔròu yǒu dānxíng ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG xū ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG shǐZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG wèi ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG è ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGfǎn ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGshā zhě fán cǐ qī qíng hé hé shì zhī dāng yòng xiāng xū xiāng shǐ liáng zhě wù yòng xiāng è xiāngfǎn zhě ruò yǒudú yí zhì kěyòng xiāng wèi xiāngshā zhě bù ěr wù héyòng yě yào yǒu suān xián gānkǔ xīn wǔwèi yòu yǒu hánrè wēn liáng sì qì jí yǒudú wúdú yīnqián bào qián cǎi zhì shí rì shēng shú shàng dì suǒ chū zhēn wěi chén xīn bìng gè yǒu fǎ yàoxìng

I already can see some plausible structures. For example:
YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi jūn zhǔ yǎng mìng
YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi chén zhǔ yǎngxìng
YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍwǔ zhǒng wèi zuǒ shǐ zhǔ zhì bìng

You can see that wǔ was added inside some long repeated expression (I happen to remember that wǔ is the number 5, the repeated sequence is "there are one hundred and twenty", so it's talking about 120, 120 and 125 of something, EDIT: and I guess even without knowing the language after sampling yibai ershi and similar sequences from the texts, the numbers will be one of the easiest targets to crack).

ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG xū
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG shǐ
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG wèi
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG è
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGfǎn
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGshā

Looks like a collection of something. We don't know what, but we see the author is listing some things.
Real texts have a lot of structure regardless of the language. A lot of potential avenues.

There is absolutely nothing like this in the Voynich MS, as far as I know.