The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

主 appears at the very beginning of each recipe, after the name and the category, with only 2-3 exceptions. If 主 corresponds to daiin, where is the same pattern in the Voynich MS? Is there a guaranteed daiin near the beginning of each paragraph? This is visually the most obvious pattern in SBJ.

Good question.  Actually, the honest question would be, "Considering that 83% of SBJ recipes have a 主治 = "main use" within the first 12 characters or so, which word or pattern occurs in a similar percentage of the SPS parags within the first 60 EVA characters or so".  Since it seems that on average each Chinese character in the SBJ corresponds to about 5 EVA characters in the SPS.

If we exclude the problematic blocks of lines of the SPS where the parag breaks are not obvious, we are left with 243 "probably true" parags.  

Of these, 51 (21% of the 242) have a daiin (as a single word or part thereof) within the first 60 EVA characters. 

Of the remainder, 20 (8% of the 242) have a dair or a laiin (or both) in that range. (Those are the two other words that match the positions of 主 in the Rooster recipe).

Of the remainder, 63 (26% of the 242) have at least one of kaiin, taiin, lair, kair, tair in that range (those are guesses for other possible pronunciations/spellings/translations of 主治, based on those two alternatives above).  

In all, these options cover 55% of the 242 "good" parags.   Note that these counts do not include split occurrences (like the ~d.aiin in the Rooster translation), not variants like doiin or daiis, nor possible abbreviations like dam.

Are all those aiin/air words above variant pronunciations/spellings of "main use"?  What about the other 28% needed to match the SBJ's 83%?  I don't know yet.  Will keep looking into it.

Maybe in the VMS the "main uses" keyword is often omitted, because it is superfluous. Note that the shortest SBJ recipe omits that keyword altogether.  After all, the first 主治 serves only to separate the list of diseases from the "taste and flavor" field; if that field is present in an SBJ recipe but is omitted in the SPS version (as it was in the Rooster case), the translation of the following 主治 could have been omitted too.

All the best, --stolfi