The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Why? If the author wanted to save the knowledge, it would make sense to have it all together.

Sure.  As a small booklet or loose leaves, on the same shelf where he kept the loose sheets of the VMS.

And yet, what you have shown [with the mock conversation] 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.

But even if such interaction had been practical, the information he would get would probably less than what he could read on the text iself.

This seems to be the entry for Ephedra in this edition of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (entry 120), with the Google translation:

• 麻黃　味苦溫無毒。主治中風傷寒頭痛，溫瘧，發表出汗，去邪熱氣，止欬逆上氣，除寒熱，破癥堅積聚。一名龍沙。生山谷。
  
• Ephedra is bitter, warm in nature, and non-toxic. It is used to treat stroke, typhoid fever, headache, malaria, to induce sweating, to dispel pathogenic heat, to stop coughing and shortness of breath, to eliminate chills and fever, and to break up hard masses and accumulations. It is also called Longsha. It grows in mountain valleys.
  

The COT assumes that the Author mastered the spoken language well enough to devise a phonetic alphabet for it.   So maybe he would not need a glossary to understand that entry?

[people turned to European language with complex encription] because of total lack of any specific evidence pointing to any non-European culture, while abundance of evidence pointing towards Europe.

Which is precisely what I wrote: they assumed that the language was European because the material, layout, style, and imagery are definitely European.  

But that inference is a non-sequitur...

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.

Again, the claims "The Scribe Was Not The Author", "There Was a Draft", and "Much of The Text Has Been Retraced" are totally independent of the "Chinese Origin" theory.  Even if your theory turns out to be the correct one, I will continue to support those three claims, with the same arguments and evidence.  

And even if those three claims are debunked, I will continue to support the COT, with the same arguments and evidence.

[evidence for] Chinese hypothesis seems lacking so far. Statistical similarities between Voynichese and Chinese are very limited.

The "limited" is a subjective evaluation.  I think the length distribution and structure of the lexicon are quite strong evidence.  

On the other hand the statistical similarities between Voynichese and other "Non-Chinese" languages are less than zero.

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.

But what label correspondences do we have?  The only one I know is the Pleiades.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a list of their modern names in ten out of possibly 50-100 candidate languages. 

The modern Mandarin name is 昴, which apparently means "hair" or "hairy", translated also as "Hairy Head".  Here is how that name is rendered in four modern Romanizations:

• Pinyin: mǎo
  
• Wade-Giles: mao3
  
• Yale: mǎu
  
• Gwoyeu Romatzyh: mao
  
• IPA: mɑʊ̯214
  

In the last line, the digits indicate pitch levels, so 214 is the Mandarin 3rd or "dipping" tone, mid-low-high.  Those digits could be inserted anywhere among the three letters. Or, in the middle of a sentence, the first 2 could be omitted if the previous syllable ended with a 2 pitch.  And then there is a thing called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

The many alleged plant identifications do not provide correspondences either, because, as I see it, on each plant at best one or two details (root, maybe leaves) were copied from the Author's draft, while the rest was made up or cribbed from random European herbals and "alchemist herbals".  Thus, for example, while You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is almost certainly Viola tricolor, the text on that page is  quite probably not about Viola tricolor, but about some other unknown and unrelated plant.  (And this Frankenstein Herbal Theory too is largely independent of the COT.  I would support it even if your origin theory is correct.)

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

The diary of the Lewis and Clark expedition is a text that should be used as a control in any statistical analysis of Voynichese.  (I have started preparing a version suitable for such purposes, but it is a big task.).  I once counted five different spellings of the word "buffalo"/"buffalos", even two in the same paragraph.  And that is nothing compared to the names of the Native American tribes that they met.  And the valiant military officers who wrote them were properly educated in English...

, without even questioning why the label for, say, "root" ended up spelled differently on many occasions

  
We don't know even whether the labels mean "root", "red", "stinky", "poisonous", or "Number 17".  How can we tell that they were spelled inconsistently?

And anyway, as shown above with "mɑʊ̯214", the spelling system could have allowed the same word to be written in many equivalent ways.  

And even Culpeper's Herbal (~1650) has inconsistent spelling of many common words like "alreadie"/"already", "barreness"/"barrenness", "becaus"/"because", "marveilously"/"merveilously", "mouthes"/"mouths", etc.  That would not have bothered readers of the time...

All the best, --stolfi