The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Pepper]

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.

I think the origin story is not at all convincing but that's largely irrelevant to whether the solution is correct or not, so it's a shame to get bogged down in arguments about it.

Abstractly that may be true, but in practice any attempt to decipher the VMS must make some assumption about its origin and how it was produced. That is necessary to limit the possibilities for the language and encoding, to estimate the fraction of errors, and to exclude spurious features from analysis. 

In fact, most attempts at decipherment to date have made the same assumption about the origin: the manuscript was created in Europe, and the text and diagrams (not just the script) were original creations by the Author, and either they were a nonsensical hoax, or their meaning was perfectly known to the author. In the second case, every word and every detail of the drawings was intentional; and therefore could be a clue for the decipherment, or had to be explained by it.

And I believe that those attempts failed, and were doomed to fail, because that assumption is false.  The "Chinese Theory", in contrast, provides an entirely different set of candidate languages and a very different type of "encryption"; and it implies that, while the text and diagrams had meaning, the Author himself had only a limited understanding of them.  Thus he must have made many errors, and (in the Herbal especially) made up a lot of stuff that he had failed to record.  And therefore it demands very different approaches to decipherment.

That all sounds like a convenient means to explain away the oddities of the text that don't fit the proposed translation, which is certainly a feature of nearly all Voynich theories!

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The solution part of the theory IS falsifiable. Jorge has even suggested a plaintext for the recipes section. Falsifying it won't be easy but also not impossible, if somebody is sufficiently motivated.

I disagree. It may be theoretically falsifiable in the same way as a teapot orbiting the sun is theoretically falsifiable, but practically not. It has been suggested that the plaintext can be some older version of a known Chinese book possibly transcribed with mistakes from an unknown version of an Oriental language. How do you refute this? Other than providing a complete solution, which would falsify most competing theories.

On the other hand, if we assume a perfect transcription of the known text from Classical Chinese, then yes it is falsifiable and as far as I'm concerned my experiment with computing longest repeated contexts a few posts ago did falsify it.

Having read more, I agree.