The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

As I tried to explain in my Voynich Day talk, in any study of the VMS you cannot avoid assuming some Origin Theory, aka "fictional story to explain how the VMS ended up exactly as we see it". 

But not everyone may agree with your claim that each of us must assume an Origin/language theory. 

To be clear, by "must" I did not mean some sort of obligation, like "one must provide evidence" or "one must be civil and impersonal".  I meant an unavoidable law of nature.  Any analysis or measurement one does on the VMS implies some assumption about how it was created.  

For instance, when one counts and compares occurrences of digraphs per page (the basis of Currier's A and B classification), one is implicitly  assuming that each page was composed in a single language and encoding.  As opposed to each page having some variable number of lines in each of two languages.  Or any one of 17 languages.

[you think] that people think it is a cypher because - and only because -  they believe the language is (Indo?)European.

Well, why do people think it is a cipher (meaning a non-trivial cryptographic encoding of a natural language) and not a plaintext (a simple phonetic or letter substitution of the same)?  

If one takes a manuscript book from the 1400s at random from a shelf, a  priori -- before opening it -- one should assign probability near 1 to it being plaintext; because the vast majority of such books are plaintexts, and moreover a cipher is much more laborious to write and read.  

So the common belief that the VMS is a cipher must be based on what they see after they have looked into it.  What exactly is the reasoning that leads people to that belief?

it is perfectly possible for someone to criticize the Chinese Theory because they find the evidence unpersuasive for it and therefore see the theory as unproven.  Or even because they think the absence of certain evidence makes the theory not only unproven but unlikely.

Probabilities add to 1.  When one assigns low probability to "Chinese", one is assigning probability near 1 to "not Chinese".   Shouldn't that theory be based on evidence too?

All the best, --stolfi