19-12-2025, 06:33 PM
This runs into the same problem most solutions do, namely that the set of letters is just too small and their order too restricted. This might be solvable with a clever encoding, but it's hard to motivate it based on 15th Century linguistics
By contrast, the original motivation for speculating an origin in Northeast or Southeast Asia is the way phonology was encoded in Mandarin Pinyin; the strong CVT arrangement greatly decreases the conditional entropy of letters in those texts. Interestingly, though I'm not sure I've seen Stolfi talk about it, the way they were recorded in rime dictionaries is also suggestive. It varies by period and compiler, but you can look up characters through a hierarchy of vowels, place of articulation, manner of articulation, tone, and medial. If you recorded Chinese characters as "coordinates" in any of these systems, you would get something akin to Voynichese's positional variation. (I've taken a few stabs at it, but nothing tremendously convincing.)
It's not inconceivable that it's European and monosyllabic, but there really is a sense in which languages in the Sinosphere weren't just built different, they were understood by their speakers to be built in a way that's amiable to the proposal of the Chinese theory
By contrast, the original motivation for speculating an origin in Northeast or Southeast Asia is the way phonology was encoded in Mandarin Pinyin; the strong CVT arrangement greatly decreases the conditional entropy of letters in those texts. Interestingly, though I'm not sure I've seen Stolfi talk about it, the way they were recorded in rime dictionaries is also suggestive. It varies by period and compiler, but you can look up characters through a hierarchy of vowels, place of articulation, manner of articulation, tone, and medial. If you recorded Chinese characters as "coordinates" in any of these systems, you would get something akin to Voynichese's positional variation. (I've taken a few stabs at it, but nothing tremendously convincing.)
It's not inconceivable that it's European and monosyllabic, but there really is a sense in which languages in the Sinosphere weren't just built different, they were understood by their speakers to be built in a way that's amiable to the proposal of the Chinese theory