The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

As someone who speaks not just one but several Chinese sub-groups (a dialect in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 閩/福建話 family, a dialect in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 客家話, and some Cantonese, and ofc, Mandarin), I can safely say that they are as far apart as any European language and mutually unintelligible to each other.

Back in the 2000s, for a brief time I entertained the idea that the sources of the VMS were from the land of the Bai people, who, as I read somewhere, were famous for their medical knowledge. Which "dialect" is spoken there?  

(I still think that the big red glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are attempts by the Author to copy the book or author name of the original Chinese source, but upside-down.  And a possible reading of those glyphs as upside-down Chinese characters seemed to be the name of a legendary author of a Bai medical text.  Alas, while the Mandarin reading of those characters matched the sound, that name was written with different characters.  Os something like that.)

However, the same texts can be spoken out loud in any of them without changing the written words. [...] They can see the exact same texts and just pronounce them as they like locally. (and within the proper Chinese dynasty regions as well, the dialects are as varied in the past and maybe even more)

Indeed.  And then there are other monosyllabic languages in East Asia -- like Tibetan, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese -- that could also be Voynichese.  By "Chinese Theory" I usually implicitly include these languages as well.  One possible point in their favor is that they could have been visited by Europeans even while China itself was closed to foreigners.

This convenience even extended to ancient Japanese, Korean, and surrounding regions influenced by Chinese culture.

But Japanese and Korean are not monosyllabic, so they don't seem to match the morphology of Voynichese words.  Unless the local medical/astrological/pharmaceutical language was not really Japanese or Korean, but mostly some bastardized Chinese-like language...

One historical event brought the spread of knowledge and crucially medical practices and physicians to the whole South Asia coastal region, even as far as the Middle East, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (known in the Chinese sources as 鄭和下西洋). Started in 1405 till 1433, with 7 voyages total. And part of the fleets travelled as far as the Mamluk Sultanate (most believe started from the 5th voyage in 1416)

Thanks, that is another plausible variant of the "Chinese Theory": that instead of the European Author going to "China", China (proper) came to the Author...

All the best, --stolfi