The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Of course any reasonable person would write this down on the margin as "ma huang - some herb, can be bought as flakes in apothecary", because this is already a lot of useful information.

Again: IF the Author had collected such a glossary, it would most probably be a separate booklet.  Not part of the VMS that have today (which, at the time, seems to have been kept as 4-5 separate stacks or quires of loose bifolia).  The glossary would almost certainly be on paper, like the Author's notes and draft.  And then the size of its pages would probably be different from that of the VMS vellum folios, so that it could not be bound together with them.

That this is some pretty common herb that probably has some medicinal use

The point of that mock conversation was only to show how awkward and pointless it would be for the Author to get glosses for the unfamiliar terms. 

Ephedra sinica was only a random example.  It is in fact an important herb in Chinese medicine (source of ephedrine, from which many modern drugs are derived), but AFAIK it was unknown in Europe in the 1400s.   The Author would have known it was a medicinal herb just from the fact that it was listed in that book he transcribed; and presumably he understood the language well enough to get from that text as much information about it as the Dictator himself knew.

By the way, the structure of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. could be interpreted as sort of a table of contents, with short descriptions of the four main sections of the VMS...

I find the argument that a XV century cipher would have been certainly deciphered by now completely unfounded.[/quote

I did not say that.  I said that the naive theory that is an European language with a simple substitution cipher was debunked long ago; and that is why many people turned to, among other alternatives, an European language with a complex encryption scheme.   Improperly excluding non-European languages, only because of the physical and stylistic evidence.

[quote]I think any need to involve the Chinese language just to explain why we can't decipher it is an overkill

That is not at all why I believe in the COT.   I started to believe it only after I found that the lengths and structure of Voynichese words are very similar to those of "Chinese" (monosyllabic) languages.   And then I observed other features that fit that theory, like the Zipf distribution, ~10 bits or entropy per word, somewhat small lexicon, apparent absence of function words, etc.

All the best, --stolfi