The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

What is your opinion on the ratio of characters between Chinese and VM?
According to Wikipedia, there are currently around 100,000 Chinese characters.
I assume that around 1400 there were around 20,000 (pure estimate), based on research. In 1200 BC, there were around 5000.
How do you reconcile the difference in quantity on your own? A simple translation cannot work. European script alone would be more likely.

If you use a variable length encoding (for example, one Chinese character is a Voynichese word, or one slot of a Voynichese slot grammar is a Chinese character), then I see no problem.

There are only 1182 unique characters in the web version of that Chinese manuscript. There are definitely more than enough word types in the Voynich MS to cover this.

If I'm computing this correctly, the single character Shannon entropy of the Chinese manuscript is 8.15 bits per character, while for Voynichese (is we count spaces as tokens, but merge comma spaces and dot spaces together) it's 4.06 bpc.

If Voynichese was invented to specifically record that Chinese manuscript, then 2 Voynichese characters could be enough to encode one Chinese character, assuming spaces can be used to assign different meanings to, say, "olor" and "ol or".

I think this won't work not because it's impossible to efficiently encode Chinese using Voynichese symbols, but because the mid-level structure on the scale of 5-10 Chinese characters is very visible in the Chinese MS (as it normally is in any normal plaintext in any language), and there is nothing similar in the Voynich MS. For me this speaks clearly against all possible interpretations of the Voynich MS as an ordinary plainttext (not the Catalogue of Ships type) expressed in an invented script, or via one-to-one substitution. There is something that destroys this structure. A one-to-many cipher would explain this easily.