The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

Sure, that would have solved the problem.  But the fact that such a plain intro is missing does not imply that it was meant to be a secret.  

As long as the book remained in possession of the author, such an intro would be totally unnecessary. 

To me it looks totally necessary if it was a phonetic rendering of a foreign book. There absolutely could be plaintext notes useful for the author. To specify where and when the book was recorded, how the author came across the source material, what the source material looked like, how the writing system was designed and definitely some word correspondences for any special terms of the source language that the author learned during the recording session. All this information is an essential part of the author's discovery and it wasn't in the "Chinese" language so there was no reason to put it down in the phonetic script, instead of the plaintext European language of the author.

On the other hand, if it was the choice of the author to not include any plaintext notes in the final codex and use a custom system of writing, that effectively makes the final codex enciphered and the whole Chinese theory is just a complicated way of explaining why we can't decipher it yet.