The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[tavie]

On probability, I will just say that whatever the Voynich is, after all the time that has been spent examining it, it must be something that seemed improbable:  whether it is a cypher or shorthand system that would not be expected for the time; a conlang that is far more advanced than the ones we know about; or a meaningless hoax that again is also far more complex than we would have expected for the time.  So if we ever solve the mystery, our Occam's razors will have to be blunted a little bit and tolerate a certain amount of improbability.  How much is yet to be seen.  

But I still draw a line between the improbabilities of these options, and the idea that there is an unamended plaintext/natural language.  I don't see how this is possible.

By Top Row, I mean the first line of each paragraph but with its first word and last word omitted so as to isolate a top row effect from separate paragraph/line start effects and line end effects.

This is not sufficient, since the second word on the first line of a parag may have one-leg gallows, or may be special in some other way.  To look for line break anomalies, one should exclude the first line of the parag entirely, and look only at internal breaks.

No - that bit you've quoted was specifically for examining distortions in the first lines of paragraphs ("Top Row") so it has to include the Top Row.  

The way I went about it was to firstly strip the top row, line starts, and line ends from the text. What was left was used as a basis for comparison.  This was used to generate expectations for what we should see in each of those positions and see if there were any large gaps between expectations and actual values.

Those changes will add '*' to a relatively small percentage of the text, say 10% of all words.  What remains still has hundreds of stretches of several dozen consecutive words without any '*'.   Even if the text uses some fancy encryption and/or is in some "exotic" language, those fragments should be enough to decipher it.  I cannot imagine an encryption scheme that would be viable for a text of that size and could have been conceived in that epoch, but cannot be deciphered without knowing every character of the text.

What I mean - and I'm guessing the reason nablator brought up Nick's list - is not necessarily that it is undecipherable but that it is flat and so cannot be an unaltered plaintext.  If there was ever natural language, something has been done to it. 

Line patterns at different positions of the text are serious problems for any idea that we are only seeing a natural language.

Considering the above conjectures for one-leg gallows and m/g, I don't think they are a significant problem.

The one-leg gallows problem still shows something has been done to the natural language plaintext, unless we consider it is meaningless.  An easy explanation like p = k or p = ke could still just about be in the realm of "unamended plaintext" but this is not the case when we see a more complex explanation is required if we want to make an equivalence between k words in the lower lines and p words in the Top Row.  If we think p is somehow replacing k, something is being done to the other glyphs in the word too.  

Top Row words show other behaviours than simply an absence of k and a surplus of p and f.  The word types are different than expected.  There is a Top Row effect.  Word initials can be different, word middles, and word finals.  Line Start words are different than expected.  Line End words are different than expected.  

If the text is meaningless, this doesn't matter since there's no expectation for a reasonable consistency between glyph behaviour at the different positions of the text.  But if it's not meaningless, all this implies a process - or set of processes - applied to a plaintext.  And given the odd effects at those "extreme" positions (Top Row, line start, line end), it would seem odd that there isn't some kind of process being also applied to the "pure" part of the text i.e. all mid-line words below the Top Row.  This seems more likely given the "drift" between sections, among sections, and even within the same folio.  And I'm suspicious that processes are behind the word break combinations that were first identified by Currier and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in more detail by Emma and Marco even though they propose a linguistic explanation.  And then there are the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Patrick Feaster studied:  my work looks at behaviour at absolute positions but his focuses on trends going "rightwards" and "downwards" throughout a paragraph.

Said another way: if line breaks were significant (as in a poem, song, list, etc.) we would expect the lines to have variable lengths.  The fact that they are all of about the same length, except at the ends of paragraphs, is strong evidence that the line breaks were chosen "on the fly" wherever the writing reached the right margin. 

Yes, I think so too, and this is why I suspect there is a degree of scribal agency (again assuming that it is not meaningless).  It implies to me that scribes knew at least a part of the system well enough to be able to convert one word type into another when a line break occurred in their version of the text that wasn't in any original that they were copying from.  This might not be much knowledge if it is only about easier things like adding s to initial a words, y to initial ch words, or q to initial o words when under another o word at line start.  But if the mutations are more complex, greater knowledge may be needed.