The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

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).

OK, so ignoring spaces altogether now along with all the problems associated with assuming 1 EVA character = 1 glyph in Voynichese, looking at your transcription I'm getting (306 / 55881) = 0.5476% as the probability of a random 5-gram being 'daiin'. The probability of the 1st 60 glyphs containing at least one 'daiin' as a substring is therefore

1.0 - ((1.0 - 0.005476)^56) = 1.0 - (0.9945 ^ 56) = 1.0 - 0.7353 = 0.2647 (0.26471295... doing the calculation in my phone's calculator app without any rounding beyond the app's precision)

So the probability of 'daiin' occuring randomly within the first 60 EVA characters is ~26.5%, and it occurs there in the SPS 21% of the time.

If you want to take the time and run the numbers for all of your candidate misspellings to make the case that the numbers are above random chance, go ahead. I feel I've done my due diligence here.