The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

Again: IF the Author had collected such a glossary, it would most probably be a separate booklet.

Why? If the author wanted to save the knowledge, it would make sense to have it all together. If such notes existed, the value of the book without these notes would be greatly diminished even for the author. Keeping the commentary and the notes together with the main text looks like a very sensible thing to do.

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. 

And yet, what you have shown was exactly the opposite, that author immediately got very useful information about an unfamiliar term that made a lot of sense to keep and that could have been likely lost if the author didn't keep a note of it.

...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.

Because of total lack of any specific evidence pointing to any non-European culture, while abundance of evidence pointing towards Europe. You created a scenario that can explain the present state of the manuscript by introducing a specific interaction of several parties: the reader, the author, the scribe, possibly the retracers.

One of the point of my recent flurry of competing scenarios: the prisoner, the traveller, the hermit, the lunatic, is to show that it's not very hard to invent an origin story that would explain various aspects of the manuscript. There are endless possibilities. I don't think one can prove a theory by providing a compelling origin story. One can use a compelling origin story to help one build a proof based on specific evidence, quite possible. But in this aspect the Chinese hypothesis seems lacking so far. Statistical similarities between Voynichese and Chinese are very limited. What is more important, if Voynichese was a faithful phonetic representation of any natural language, it would have been solved at least partially by using label correspondences in the text. As far as I remember, the Chinese theory "solves" this by suggesting the author used an imperfect transcription for 240 pages without having any second thoughts, without even questioning why the label for, say, "root" ended up spelled differently on many occasions, without attaching any plaintext annotations in Latin. So far, all of this doesn't sound even remotely plausible to me.