The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

1. I never claimed that the plants only occur in Europe

And I did not mean to claim that you did.   I only pointed out that the best identifications that I know still are not specifically European.

2. But you accept a water lily, even though the flower does not match the VM drawing at all.

I was trying to be generous.  If we exclude that case, my point is even stronger: the only VMS plant that is definitely identified, not just "most similar to" -- namely f9v, Viola tricolor -- is native to all of Eurasia.  Thus the match is not a sign of "European".

3. You complain about accuracy. Show me a few plants drawn in 1400 that are accurate enough for you

The point is not that "the VMS drawings are bad".  The point is that, if one must tolerate errors of that magnitude when comparing drawings (of any medieval manuscript) to real plants, one will inevitably get many false matches.  Therefore, finding a few such "matches" does not prove anything.

4. You fundamentally reject anything that contradicts your Chinese theory.

It is the other way around.  I believe in the Chinese Origin theory because I see several bits of evidence for it, and I still don't know of any good evidence or argument against it.  Do you have any?

5. You do not understand the art of representation and the importance of details

But how do you square this with point 3 above?  If Medieval drawings are full of gross errors and fictional details, how do we know whether a certain detail is significant and important?

6. Basically, you are not up to date. You've simply missed too much in recent years.

Frankly, I was surprised at how little the field has advanced in the last 20 years. 

When I left, the C14 date had just came out, Rafal had just found that Barschius worked at Rudolf's court, and Gordon Rugg was still pushing his "grille hoax" theory.  

What great advances have there been since then?

I see that there have been studies of dresses and hats that merely confirmed the C14 result.

We got the Beinecke 2014 scans, which Rene used to produce a much better transcription.

We got multi-spectral scans of 10 pages, but it seems that people have not yet analyzed them properly. (No one had noticed that big water stain on the UV images of f116v, for instance.)

We got the McCrone report.  I already posted what I think of it.  But anyway it did not tell us anything that was significant and unexpected.

Rene and his collaborators have uncovered an amazing amount of details of  the history of the VMS between Barschius and Beinecke, and tracked down the probable "bearer" of the "600 ducats" book.  

We already knew that the VMS had been scribed in Europe.  Koen mapped the occurrence of the characteristic Ghibelline merlons and concluded that the VMS was scribed specifically in a smaller area between Northern Italy and Central Europe.  

Someone discovered that the trivial line-breaking algorithm results in different word distribution at the start and end of each line. That could explain at least some of the anomalous statistics at those positions. (But this possibility does not seem to have been properly investigated yet.)

The Rohonc Codex was deciphered! (It is not directly related to the VMS, but it is another example of a baffling manuscript that was almost wrongly dismissed as a hoax.)

What else have I missed?

All the major mysteries that were baffling in 2005 are still baffling today. 

We still don't know the language and the "encryption method", of course.

We still don't know what exactly is the Voynichese alphabet.  Not even whether hooked-p is the same letter as straight-p.

We still don't know whether the drawings in Bio are organs disguised as baths, or baths shaped like organs, or organs disguised as baths shaped like organs, or...

We still don't know the meaning of a single word of Voynichese.  (Maybe the Pleiades, but it is just a name...)

We still can't read the marginalia of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f116v.

We still don't know what is the language of the month names.

I see people still proposing bogus substitution-cipher "translations" into every language known and unknown to man.  The only new thing there is that the LLMs have increased the frequency from one proposal per month to 2-3 per week.

There have been a couple more "hoax" proposals, describing methods that, like Rugg's, generate random text that superficially looks like Voynichese.  But  the resemblance does not go very deep.  And, like Rugg, the proponents of those methods could not explain why the the Author would have chosen to generate that weird kind of gibberish.

Between the card punch days and 2005,  a zillion statistical studies had revealed some intriguing patterns in the Voynichese text.  But no one could get definite insight into the "encryption" out of those numbers.  Since 2005, there have been a zillion more studies -- but apparently with no better success.

So I still don't think that I missed much...