The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

Unfortunately, there is a large number of schemes that the Author may have chosen to map the structure of a "Chinese" language to the structure of a VMS word.  Even for a single language, at a single stage of evolution.  The Author may have decided to use a singe glyph to encode the [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.] of Mandarin, as pinyin does.  Or, conversely, he may have used two glyphs for a single phoneme, like the English use of "sh".

And then there is the tone.  In Mandarin, is not a property of any specific vowel, but of the syllable as a whole.  Therefore, if it is indicated by an explicit glyph in the VMS, this glyph may be inserted anywhere in the word,  with the position changing randomly between occurrences of the same word.  Or in some more complicated way.Check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to see how insanely complicated the scheme could be.

Pinyin (PY) and the national Vietnamese script have settled to use diacritics over a specific vowel to indicate the tone.  Another scheme that was used for Mandarin, in pre-Unicode days, was a digit placed at the end.  Tibetan used a silent consonant prefixed to the syllable. 

Another scheme, used for languages with many tones, or to compare tones in different languages, is to use digits 1-5 to denote pitch, and a sequence of digits to denote the pitch profile of the tone.  Thus, for example, the flat tone of Madarin in PY jīng could be written as jing3, the ascending tone of míng as ming25, the dipping tone of shǒu as shou213, etc.  And these digits could be inserted anywhere in the word, e.g. sh2o1u3.  

This  sounds plausible to me. Indeed while pinyin is quite efficient and well thought through, one can't assume a phonetic system invented by a person without deep knowledge of Chinese and at a time when there was no existing phonetic alphabet for Chinese, would be as well structured. So, in principle a script like Voynichese with all its strange properties could be designed to represent sounds of a language similar to Chinese.  I still don't think there is good enough evidence that Voynichese was actually designed for this purpose though.