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At that point, Classical Chinese was coming up on its 2nd millennium as either the de facto or de jure language of government---albeit not always alone. But certainly during the Ming era that would have been the scribal language of any literate person informing the Voynich scribe, including from most neighboring kingdoms. That's also late enough that we have a good picture of the pronunciation of most of the Chinese languages, certainly good enough that if we got a foothold on Voynichnese we could compare them.
Now, of course, there's no reason to assume that the informant would be literate (in fact, it makes more sense under the hypothesis to assume not) or speaking any of the Chinese varieties, but any kind of Chinese in the 1400s would be approachable with the right tools.
(10-11-2025, 07:19 AM)JoJo_Jost wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At that time, in china a kind of official language was just beginning to develop, and otherwise there were hundreds of dialects and languages in the region.
At that point, Classical Chinese was coming up on its 2nd millennium as either the de facto or de jure language of government---albeit not always alone. But certainly during the Ming era that would have been the scribal language of any literate person informing the Voynich scribe, including from most neighboring kingdoms. That's also late enough that we have a good picture of the pronunciation of most of the Chinese languages, certainly good enough that if we got a foothold on Voynichnese we could compare them.
Now, of course, there's no reason to assume that the informant would be literate (in fact, it makes more sense under the hypothesis to assume not) or speaking any of the Chinese varieties, but any kind of Chinese in the 1400s would be approachable with the right tools.