The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There would be a most common word in most texts. If we take two longest sentences from two texts of similar sizes, it's not strange that each would contain the respective most common word of either text. It would be a very promising find if the count of the most common word in the longest sentence of both texts would be the same non trivial (>2) number, but in this case this didn't happen even after reinterpreting other similar words as daiin.

It is not just that the number of occurrences of  daiin (5) or daiin|dair|laiin (8) in the longest SPS parag is similar to the number of occurrences of 主治 (6) or 主 (7) in the longest SBJ recipe.  The main point is that the relative positions of those occurrences, with are quite irregularly spaced, are remarkably similar in the two parags.  The five occurrences of daiin match five of the seven occurrences of 主, while the eight occurrences of daiin|dair|laiin match all seven, with one left over.  

As noted in the paper, there is a constant shift of 0.15 μ in all SBJ positions relative to the SPS ones, but in retrospect that shift has a simple explanation: the SPS version of that recipe clearly omits the "taste and warmth" field of the SBJ recipe (the 4 Chinese characters 味甘微温).

It may be that the version that the Author used as source had omitted that field, or maybe he felt that it was unnecessary.  But it is quite possible that those 4 characters were not there in 1400.  According to Wikipedia and other sources, the original text of the SBJ has been lost, and what we have today is a tentative reconstruction by various authors up to the 1600s.  So maybe that field of the recipe was "hallucinated" by those Chinese Frankensteins, by analogy with other entries.  Come to think of it, it does not make sense in that recipe, because it is actually about several remedies from various parts of the "Rooster" -- including its "white excrement".  Did its head and intestines really taste like its poo?  Hm...

Suppose the corresponding paragraph of the Voynich MS was a mangled phonetic representation of that Chinese recipe. I guess this would be immediately obvious after matching other repeating characters in this recipe, I think there should have been a few, and the report won't be "daiin = use", but will be a small dictionary, a couple of other phrase matches. This didn't happen for some reason. What is the reason?

See my reply to @RadioFM above.  

I honestly thought that the figure on page 8 was enough for a first report.   But it seems that some folks will never be satisfied...

likely the gold medal in the VMS studies

I am happy to leave the silver and bronze medals to others. 

All the best, --stolfi