The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

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.

I agree. And I'm not saying that your theory is impossible, under some circumstances, so your probabilities could be a better description of objective reality than mine. I think there is one practical caveat though, which depends on your plans with regard to the Chinese theory. There are generally two kinds of Voynich theories: the solution kind (providing some specific plaintext for specific parts of the MS, be it labels, lines, etc) and the origin story kind, of which your Chinese theory is an example. While the solution theories can be verified more or less objectively, by reproducing the process and computing various statistics to find how likely it's for the result to be spurious, the only more or less objective criterion I know for the origin theories is how persuasive they are. If you agree with this, then in a sense your probabilities are not really important, it's the collective probabilities of the readers that make the difference.

On the other hand, there are, as far as I understand, hundreds of Voynich MS theories happily enjoyed by their respective authors according to their subjective probabilities, without much of public interest.

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..

Yes, there is a lot of flexibility. For example, in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. cursive a lot of lines can be merged and simplified, but again according to some rules, as far as I know. Anyway, since we are talking about an imperfect copy, this doesn't really matter, but this also undermines the argument that:

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, ...

As I already said, I don't think this is true. As far as I can tell, both left weirdos are much more similar to some glyphs of European scripts. I've You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in my previous post. But maybe I'm missing something here. Could you provide an example of Chinese characters that look like these weirdos? Preferably not any modern variants of the past 100 years, since there have been quite a few Chinese/Japanese modern font styles developed under strong influence of the European typesetting and calligraphy.

• the word structure (quite unlike that of "European" languages, but just like that of the "Chinese" languages);

What do you mean exactly by "the word structure"? In all flavours of Chinese a word /correction/ syllable consists of an initial sound, a vowel and a final, as far as I know. In Voynichese the structures of words /correction/ or parts of words are much more complex than that, and you certainly are aware of this, because there are very well known "Stolfi's" models of decomposing Voynichese words, that do not conform to a simple clean prefix-infix-suffix model. I'd say if Voynichese was a phonetic representation of Chinese of any kind, this would be very obvious.

• the lack of identifiable articles, copula verbs, inflections

There is lack of identifiable anything in the Voynich MS. Statistically it's not similar to any language, including Chinese.

Also, there are a lot of grammar particles in Chinese, which would have been just as easily identifiable as the articles in the European languages. 

• the relatively large number of duplicated words, like chor chor

I don't think this is a strong argument. Duplicated words are not a feature of Classical Chinese, as far as I know. In the manuscript that you mentioned as the possible source I've only found 43 instances of duplicated character tokens. There also have been much fewer homophones in the Classical Chinese, as far as I know, so there would be not that much more duplication in the phonetic representation. After removing punctuation, I've found 15 instances of repeated words in Opus Magus. So in this aspect there is no great difference between Chinese and Latin.

It's possible to argue that the actual text of the Voynich MS is not in the Classical Chinese, but in some Chinese vernacular that the Reader uses, and that already passed though syllable simplification which resulted in many duplicated words.

• 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;
  

These are the only pieces of evidence for the Chinese theory so far that I personally would call specific. Is there a long form explanation of why these point to the Orient? I may have missed it. I understand that the Lunar year starts in Jan-Feb, etc, but on the other hand, why was there at all the need to put European Zodiac signs onto the Chinese Zodiac?

• and the similarity of the Starred Parags section with the Shennong Bencao Jing, which is being discussed separately.
  

Was this mainly about the number of entries? We don't actually know the number of entries in the Voynich MS.