The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

I would make the following points:

First, the language is not identified. It is not clear if it is in the original Classical Chinese or in translation. This has an impact on where 主(principally) might surface, especially if the language is not Sinitic. I feel to hold The Chinese Theory proved we need to have a firmer idea what language we are dealing with. A degree of ambiguity might be possible if it is Sinitic given Chinese diglossia past and present, but that ambiguity should be well-defined and carefully parsed. 

Second, it is not clear what text actually underlies it. It is not a small assumption that the text can both be the SBJ and have significant abbreviations and omissions. Given the relentless terseness of Literary Chinese, I find it hard to believe that it was further condensed; even if you're more willing to entertain the point, it raises serious questions about what the plain text actually is, and how we might know it. That most of the text does not (currently) match under Jorge's telling, and that he takes recourse to speculating that we don't have the exact plain text to explain some of the biggest deviations is better explained by not rejecting the null hypothesis.

Third, the daiin-主 correspondence is extremely weak. To a point this is expected in language, especially if the phonetic system the scribe were using were not exactly mechanical, as was common in the 15th Century. But taking a number of loosely related Voynichese words, lining them up with a Chinese character, and then finding no further patterns is suggestive of the conclusion that they are not properly lined up.

Each of these points, taken alone, is troubling for accepting the plain text proposed here, but taken together they add up to an astounding amount of freedom in making this identification. There are no constraints from the language, as it is not known; restricting it to Classical Chinese, the language of the proposed text, quickly rules out the SBJ. Allowing significant alterations beyond translation means we must discount the absence of other patterns when evaluating this, despite that obviously being valuable data in making this determination. Then, even after all this rearranging and cutting, I must accept that 主 can be written in three homophonous ways in the same paragraph to get a coarse correspondence?

No, I don't think this is a strong match, and certainly not a definitive one.