The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Jorge, do I presume correctly that you don't speak Chinese?

Correct, I don't speak Chinese, or any of the languages assumed by the "Chinese" theory (monosyllabic languages, which AFAIK are all from the area spanning from Tibet to China and Vietnam).

I studied Japanese for a couple of years, and as part of that I learned a couple dozen Chinese characters; but their reading in Japanese is usually very different.  Japanese, by the way, is definitely not monosyllabic,

I learned a bit more about the "Chinese" languages during my VMS hacking, around 2000.  Such as their computer encoding and the general nature of their phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, grammar.  Enough to prepare some texts in some of those languages for meaningful statistical analysis.

do you actually see any chance that you will push it further and at some moment assign some Voynichese words to Chinese words?

I lost interest in the VMS around 2005 precisely because I became convinced of the "Chinese" theory, but I lacked the knowledge necessary to use it to read the book, and I stood no chance of acquiring that knowledge.

To do that one must guess the right language among 50 or so very different candidates, and know how that language was pronounced in the 1400s.   Some of those languages had somewhat phonetic scripts since before that time, but others used non-phonetic Chinese characters.  Not being bound by the writing, the pronunciation of the latter changed quite a lot since then,  We know that because the poems from that era that were supposed to rhyme (even because poetry manuals said so) do not rhyme anymore. 

But I now think I can still do some useful research on the VMS even with that handicap.  Among other things, I think that I can produce additional evidence for the "Chinese" theory, that would convince the skeptics...

And I think I already made a few new discoveries, independent of the COT.  Like the MRT.  And the big water stain on f116v, that seems to explain why we can't read it...

All the best, --stolfi