The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I already pointed out this problem with your repeated assertion that 'daiin' is the most common word in the SPS.

Sorry for wasting your time with that confusion.  Indeed, you are right, daiin is not the most common word in the SPS.  

But the argument for "主≈daiin" is not "both are the most common words in each file".  That would be a bogus argument.  In the translations of the Pentateuch into Chinese and Vietnamese that I have at hand (definitely the same book, in two monosyllabic languages), the most common words are  的 = "of" and người = "man, person, people", respectively.

And likewise the argument that f105v.32-38 is a version of the "rooster" recipe is not that they are both the longest parags in each file.

Those observations (right or wrong) are only what led me to check whether those parags and those words corresponded to each other.  

The evidence that VMS f105v.32-38 is a version of the SBJ "rooster" recipe, and that daiin is the VMS equivalent of 主 (or 主治) is the close match of the distances between occurrences of those words in those two parags.

More precisely and generally, the claim is that, modulo occasional "typos", the word or suffix daiin in the Voynichese version of the SBJ (the SPS) generally occurs near the beginning of each recipe or sub-recipe to introduce the list of uses (indications, benefits, effects, etc).  A role that in the Chinese version of the SBJ is usually played by the characters 主治 = "main use(s)", but sometimes 主 = "mainly" alone, or (in other recipes)  治 = "use(s)", or sometimes other constructions (like in the "Eggs" sub-recipe of Rooster).

In retrospect, I should have given only the evidence, without telling how I got to it.  (And, blush, that is the very advice that I gave to @Rafal for his Rohonc paper, a few weeks ago.  See @Rafal, why you should not do that?)

So, it does not matter now whether daiin is really the most common word in the SPS. If I counted wrong, that was another lucky break for me (besides the correspondence between Chinese and Voynichese being nearly 1:1 character-for-token, the longest recipe surviving the loss of the central bifolio and the caca the Scribe made on f108v-f111r, and the omitted parts of the recipe being at the ends rather than in the middle, and that SPS parag still being the longest one in spite of those omissions.)

But how did I get that count wrong?  Trying to reconstruct how I got to that claim, it seems that my reasoning was the other way around: first I guessed that f105v.32-38 was the "rooster" recipe (both the longest parags in the two files), then I saw that 主 occurred 7 times in that recipe, and so I looked for what were the most common strings in that paragraph that could correspond to it.  And daiin occurs 5 times in that parag, whereas chedy occurs only 2. (I looked for strings rather than words because I did not trust spaces, not even by counting commas as spaces.)

It turns out that aiin occurs 18 times in that parag, and kaiin occurs 5 times too.  And in fact the "eggs"  sub-recipe, which has no 主 in the SBJ, seems to have an lkaiin at the place where the uses of "eggs" should start.  Hmm...

But, well, again, apologies for wasting your time.  

All the best, --stolfi