The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

But why would only one word/phrase correspond? Shouldn't the words around it also match and have a similar structure?

Check the text of that recipe.  There are 69 distinct Chinese characters, but the ones that repeat,
with their general meanings, are

      7 主 = "main, mainly"
      5 治 = "use". 
      3 白 =  "white"
      3 鸡 = "chicken, fowl"
      2 下 = "low(er), bottom, under"
      2 中 = "middle, center"
      2 子 = "child"
      2 寒 = "chill, cold"
      2 杀 = "kill, abate, terminate"
      2 温 = "warm"
      2 热 = "hot, burn, fever"
      2 神 = "spirit, magic, god, supernatural"
      2 血 = blood

So, should there be repeated Voynichese words matching these repetitions?  

For 主 the answer is yes: its seven occurrences match five occurrences of daiin as word or suffix, one occurrence of laiin as word, and one occurrence of dair as word. Both are very close to daiin in "ink distance".

The five occurrences of 治 are all part of the compound 主治  = "main use(s)". Which may have been transcribed as just "mainly" hence just daiin. Or maybe some of the words that follow daiin in that parag are the Voynichese for 治.

The two occurrences of 寒 = "chill" occur next to each other in the condition 伤寒寒热 that Google translates as "typhoid fever with alternating chills and fever".  That is, 寒寒 could perhaps be translated as "shiver".  (Repetition is considered bad in English and students are taught to avoid it.  But it is a not uncommon device in Chinese to mean repeated action, intensification, and other things.  It is used in other languages too, like in Italian "piano piano" = "little by little".)  In the SPS parag, at about the same position, there are the words ytaiin.otair which again are very close to each other in "ink distance".

The character 鸡 jī = "chicken" occurs in the name of the recipe 丹雄鸡 dān xióng jī = "rooster" (literally "red male chicken") and in the compound 鸡子 jī zǐ = "egg" (literally "chicken child").  In the SPS, the first one would be poar.keeo; by position, the second one would be somewhere in CKhy.Sheo.qoeeo.lkaiin.Chs.  So 鸡 zǐ "chicken" in Voynichese could be eeo.

The character 神 shén = "god, magic, supernatural" occurs in the compound 通神 tōng shén which Google struggles to translate but may mean "clears the spirit" or something of the sort.  Its correspondent in the Voynichese text is not clear but may be somewhere  in  ol.otaiin.okeey.qokaiin.or. The other occurrence is in 神物 shén wù = "magical substance", and, by position, should be in oaiir.ain.okShey.   There are several possibilities, but maybe 神 is okee and okSh, the plume and ligature of the latter being due to pronunciation variation, like stress, tone sandhi, etc.

Of the two occurrences of 子 = "child", one is in the compound 鸡子 = "egg".  The other is in the compound 女子 that means "woman" (literally "woman child", that is "girl" or "young woman") in Mandarin.  But, according to Google translate, in Cantonese (the language spoken in Shanghai and HongKong) the term for "woman" is another compound, written 女人 (literally "woman person").  So if the Dictator was Cantonese, he probably read 女子 as 女人, but still read  鸡子 as 鸡子.  That is a possible explanation for why there does not seem to be the same Voynichese word repeated in those two places.

Of the three occurrences of 白 bái = "white", one is in the "veterinarian uses" sentence at the end, which apparently is missing in the SPS.  The other two are in the disease 赤白沃 , literally "red white irrigate", which Google translates as "leucorrhea"; and in 屎白 = "white part of the poo" (literally "excrement white").  So again the two compounds may have been different phrases in the dictation.  But, by position, the white part of chicken poo may be kaiShd in Voynichese.

And so on.  Some of the repeated characters seem to correspond to similar words of Voynichese, some don't.  But there are many possible reasons for the latter.

This recipe offers a few other possible cribs besides daiin.  For instance, I would bet that Sheeo means 头 = "head".  It occurs a couple dozen times in the SBJ, including as the name of a medicine 白头公 bái tóu gōng = "white-haired man" (?!?)  But that guess would have to be confirmed by analyzing other recipes.

Couldn't I find a ton of books that have the same "matching" word positions in a ton of different languages?

See again the computations in my response to @dashtofsk.  First you would have to find a book with 350 to 450 paragraphs, with about 30-35 words per parag on average.  Found one?  The List of Lunch Specials at the Vagharshapat Buddhist Monastery for the Year 1278? Will do.  Now check whether the most common word in that book, call it X, occurs at least seven times in its longest paragraph.  Check?  Now pair up seven of those occurrences with seven of the eight occurrences of D = daiin|dair|laiin in the longest parag of the SPS, namely f105v.32-38, any way you wish; and count the words between those occurrences of X.  Do they match the counts between the corresponding occurrences of D in that parag?

Well, if they do, congratulations: you just discovered that the SPS is a lunch menu, and the Voynichese language is probably 13th century Armenian, which had to securely encrypted because one of the few sources of entertainment in the monastery was betting on what would be on the table on each day.  Or maybe Georgian, if the cook happened to be a Kyrgyz who moved to Vagharshapat after the Mongols destroyed the Buddhist orphanage at Zestaponi, where he had been living since his parents divorced over a dispute over horses and neither of them wanted to keep him, so they handed him over to a merchant who happened to pass through Özgön on his way home from Shangdu, who promised to take the boy, who reminded him of his nephew Marco, to some nice orphanage in Venice, but the boy ran away when they were crossing the Qvirila and was found wandering in the woods by a Mingrelian sheperd who had just converted to Buddhism and did odd jobs at the monastery in his spare time.

Especially if we're only matching one word based on spacing and ignoring the words around it?

As you see, besides 主 there are few repeated characters in that recipe that could be matched.  

You also said you didn't look through many Chinese books.. would this method work on other Chinese books or is this a unique case? Or have you not tested that yet?

There are several other old Chinese books on subjects that could have been used as source for the VMS.  In fact, I believe that the other sections of the VMS will be found to be other important Chinese books on astrology, anatomy, botany, etc.; and the language will be the same as that of the SPS.

But I don't know anything about those other books, much less how many parags they have and what is their average words per parag.  I knew that the SBJ had 365 recipes because that is always mentioned in any article about it.  I doubt that any other book comes anywhere close to that.

All the best, --stolfi