The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

there have been many explanations for [the big red f1r] characters. Only recently user Dobri You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a tentative match between these glyphs and a certain European medieval script. I'm not arguing for Dobri's explanation, I'm just stating that alternative explanations, that do not involve unlikely sequences of events, do exist.

Under any theory, the creation of the VMS as a whole was an extremely unlikely event.  Someone invented a new script, drew a hundred fantastic plants, wrote ~35000 words in some language/encoding that has resisted all attempts at decipherment by codebreakers, linguists, historians, paleographers, astronomers, etc.  So it is not reasonable to insist that specific steps of its creation be "likely".

Moreover, probabilities are not objective values that one can measure with some instrument or compute from scratch (in spite of what You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says on page 37).  The probability of a proposition is a measure of one's belief in it; and therefore it is inherently subjective, since it depends on what one knows, not only about the proposition specifically, but about life, the universe and everything.  There is no such thing as the probability of something, but only my probability, your probability, that bitcoin investor's probability, ... The only thing that probability theory says is how you should compute your probability of a certain event, based on your probabilities of other events, and your knowledge of the connections between those events -- for better hopes of success in the world, hopefully. 

So, well, I can only say that my probability for the basic premise of the Chinese Theory (CT)

• "around 1400, some European traveler spent a few years in a country where they spoke a monosyllabic language with complicated writing system, saw some books that seemed to have important knowledge unknown in Europe, decided to take them home, and the only viable way he could do that was to record dictation from them in a phonetic ste(not ga!)nography system he devised." 
  

is quite high, while yours is apparently very low.  

One of the reasons my probability is high is that there definitely were thousands of Europeans who traveled to that "Generalized China" (including Tibet, Burma, Vietnam, etc.)  before the 1400.  Even You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Only a few of those travelers were recorded in history;  Marco Polo was just one of them.  So the first part of the CT should be accepted by everyone who know of those contacts.

Chinese script on the elementary level consist of individual strokes. There are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. These rules make the Chinese characters readable in many shapes and styles and the Chinese characters allow for a lot of flexibility in shape, as long as the strokes follow these rules.

Yes, but the "lot of flexibility" is really You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. For instance, the two lower strokes of 冬 can be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

This is not the way these characters are written, the stroke types are just wrong.

They definitely are. But people who do not know Chinese script will not know about the stroke order and direction.  Ask any such person to copy a Chinese character using an ordinary pen.  Then ask some other such person to copy the first person's drawing...

Again, when lay people try to imitate Chinese script, they focus on the features that most obviously distinguish them from Roman letters, namely the varying stroke width and the "serifs" created by the brush motion at the end of certain strokes. They will generally miss the features that are most important, like the direction and angle of the strokes, how they connect and cross, etc.

this could be a copy of anything then, not necessarily Chinese characters. This could be a copy of Linear B or Germanic Runes then just as likely.

Linear B and other really ancient scripts (cuneiform, Hittite hieroglyphs...) would not be known anywhere in the world by 1400.  In overall shape and stroke arrangement, BOTH You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. weirdos resemble upside-down Chinese characters more than characters of any other script that could be easily known in Europe at the time -- including Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Runic, Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian, ...

Is there any single specific piece of evidence pointing towards the Eastern origin of the manuscript?

You mean an Eastern language and Eastern semantic contents.  I gave already a few circumstantial pieces of evidence, such as 

• the word structure (quite unlike that of "European" languages, but just like that of the "Chinese" languages);
  
• the lack of identifiable articles, copula verbs, inflections
  
• the relatively large number of duplicated words, like chor chor
  
• the division of the Zodiac into 12 sectors of exactly 30 units, which may originally have been 24 sectors of 15 units;
  
• the Zodiac starting with Pisces;
  
• and the similarity of the Starred Parags section with the Shennong Bencao Jing, which is being discussed separately.