The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Battler]

As you will see there, daiin (the most common word in the SPS) corresponds quite closely to the Chinese character 主 zhǔ (the most common character in the SBJ).  Strictly speaking that character has the general sense of "main" or "mainly", but seems to occur almost always in the compound 主治 zhǔ zhì which can be translated as "indications:", or "the main uses are" or "is mainly used for".  The SBJ is a list of ~360 drugs and their uses; 主治 is a "key" in the rather uniform formula of the SBJ entries, that introduces the list of diseases.

Really interesting Jorge. 

Out of interest, are there any other sections/recipes that match daiin as well as that one? 

And do you have any suspicions for how the VMS text would have been created if this was the case? I can imagine a european attempting to transcribe chinese characters in a way that made sense to them, like something like below. (I do like how the 3 lines somewhat match..)

You may actually be on to something! This is, in fact, exactly how I would expect a European who does not know Chinese, to transcribe a Chinese text, not realizing it is supposed to be read vertically from top to bottom, right to left. He would likely rotate it so that the text flows left to right and then attempt to copy the characters. Someone should rotate the Voynich manuscript so that the text flows vertically and see if it begins to make more sense.