The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[JoJo_Jost]

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.

I am anything but an expert on China, but I did some more research.

During the Ming dynasty from 1368 onwards and the Qing dynasty, the term guanhua (官話, guānhuà – “language of the officials, Mandarin”) appeared to refer to the general standard language. However, it initially established itself in the north and was certainly not yet ‘nationwide’ 60 years later. That is what I meant when I said that it ‘began’ to spread.

At that time, however, there were hundreds of other language variants in China, and we are talking about spoken languages, not written