10-02-2026, 09:57 PM
Since I had pre-judged Jorge_Stolfi as planning to make an important and clearly explained announcement, I find it necessary here to at least note how puzzled I am by all that he has shared.
Why is this not a (presumably non-AI) slop—i.e., just some computerized calculations lacking any content or historical facts or analysis, not even based on any other graphic (let alone textual) material in the Voynich manuscript?
On purely statistical coincidental grounds, not even knowing the language, he has made claims that seem utterly lacking in historical and cultural contextual justification and plausibility.
So, do we have a simple substitution here (which most had rejected as a possibility), not even ciphered (to make it less of a natural limitation)?
Even his charts do not seem to be convincing as factual evidence (all the qualifications to make them comparable withstanding)? It seems “guess” work has helped the charts quite a bit. “In the transcription files, the boundaries between those hypothetical parags had to be guessed based on dubious clues like the spacing of the lines; but they are almost certain to be wrong, because the actual breaks must be in the middle of lines. Besides those two large blocks, there are a few smaller suspicious text blocks on other pages, each being probably two or three parags merged into one. Misplacing the parag breaks would not affect the average parag size, but would affect its deviation and the shape of the histogram.” (p. 6). All this sounds like arbitrarily introducing line breaks or modifications, by guess work, to make the charts more plausible, not even knowing Chinese.
All the enormous graphics in the VM are then just made up to make the Chinese text plausible, in oddly new writing alphabet? Why would a transcription in European/invented letters make the Chinese language any more readable or usable to whoever is reading it, even transferring it to vellum? Were there no scribes to make a copy of it for the traveler to take home?
Jorge? Are you serious when you say, “There he saw that they had many books of medicine, astronomy, etc which he felt that he must take back home. Maybe he had promised his scholar uncle, maybe he thought that they could be sold at a good price, who knows. But he could not take the books themselves, nor copy them himself, because he had not learned the written language and had no hope of learning it. Especially since those "technical" books would probably be written in Chinese characters, even though they may be pronounced in the local language. So he devised a phonetic alphabet for the language, and got a local scholar or doctor to read the books aloud, while he wrote it down. …”!
Are you saying, the traveler could not find a scribe in the whole of China to simply copy the original in Chinese? Why not just have someone translate it for him? If he did not even read Chinese, how could he know the value of a purely textual manuscript? If he did, or he could have someone translate it for him, why not write it in his own language?
The Chinese text itself became available to Europe in 1700s, it seems (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). If somebody had found something of value in the original Chinese, why not just bring the original and share it in 1400s, so it could become known then centuries earlier?
Why go through the trouble of inventing a whole new transcription system to convey an “alien” language? None of this makes sense to me, sorry.
With all due respect, I wish him well in his Chinese theory development, but this has made that theory even less plausible for me.
Why is this not a (presumably non-AI) slop—i.e., just some computerized calculations lacking any content or historical facts or analysis, not even based on any other graphic (let alone textual) material in the Voynich manuscript?
On purely statistical coincidental grounds, not even knowing the language, he has made claims that seem utterly lacking in historical and cultural contextual justification and plausibility.
So, do we have a simple substitution here (which most had rejected as a possibility), not even ciphered (to make it less of a natural limitation)?
Even his charts do not seem to be convincing as factual evidence (all the qualifications to make them comparable withstanding)? It seems “guess” work has helped the charts quite a bit. “In the transcription files, the boundaries between those hypothetical parags had to be guessed based on dubious clues like the spacing of the lines; but they are almost certain to be wrong, because the actual breaks must be in the middle of lines. Besides those two large blocks, there are a few smaller suspicious text blocks on other pages, each being probably two or three parags merged into one. Misplacing the parag breaks would not affect the average parag size, but would affect its deviation and the shape of the histogram.” (p. 6). All this sounds like arbitrarily introducing line breaks or modifications, by guess work, to make the charts more plausible, not even knowing Chinese.
All the enormous graphics in the VM are then just made up to make the Chinese text plausible, in oddly new writing alphabet? Why would a transcription in European/invented letters make the Chinese language any more readable or usable to whoever is reading it, even transferring it to vellum? Were there no scribes to make a copy of it for the traveler to take home?
Jorge? Are you serious when you say, “There he saw that they had many books of medicine, astronomy, etc which he felt that he must take back home. Maybe he had promised his scholar uncle, maybe he thought that they could be sold at a good price, who knows. But he could not take the books themselves, nor copy them himself, because he had not learned the written language and had no hope of learning it. Especially since those "technical" books would probably be written in Chinese characters, even though they may be pronounced in the local language. So he devised a phonetic alphabet for the language, and got a local scholar or doctor to read the books aloud, while he wrote it down. …”!
Are you saying, the traveler could not find a scribe in the whole of China to simply copy the original in Chinese? Why not just have someone translate it for him? If he did not even read Chinese, how could he know the value of a purely textual manuscript? If he did, or he could have someone translate it for him, why not write it in his own language?
The Chinese text itself became available to Europe in 1700s, it seems (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). If somebody had found something of value in the original Chinese, why not just bring the original and share it in 1400s, so it could become known then centuries earlier?
Why go through the trouble of inventing a whole new transcription system to convey an “alien” language? None of this makes sense to me, sorry.
With all due respect, I wish him well in his Chinese theory development, but this has made that theory even less plausible for me.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)