Theory that the final section is a multilingual glossary

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If I remember correctly, Jorge_Stolfi's answer to this was something like "the original notes of the author could have contained European notes and translations and remarks, but this specific rendering on vellum was specifically designed to only contain the original manuscript in its phonetic form with no extraneous writing". This is not impossible and not even very strange, if one thinks of it as a presentation document accompanied by a separate booklet of notes.

I do think that the Author made a glossary (among many other writings that did not go into MS 408). However, this glossary:

• Would have been a separate document, on paper.
  
• Would have been arranged alphabetically according to whetever order the Author chose for his alphabet.
  
• Would have contained only the "Chinese" terms that he did not know.
  
• Would contain only a few diseases and a few remedies that he could recognize from explanations by a local doctors.
  
• It would map Voynichese to his own native language, not to Latin.
  

The core of the SBJ was probably written before 100 CE, thus even Chinese scholars struggle to identify many of the diseases and remedies in it.  I don't know how many diseases it covers, but since there are 365 recipes, and each may list half a dozen or more of "main uses", they are probably a couple thousand.  Even if the Author was an European doctor (and I doubt he was) he probably would have not recognized the disease from the description that a local doctor could give, much less figured out its name in his own language.

Thus his glossary, at best, would have contained only a small fraction of those thousands of terms. It would not list "dān xióng jī" because the Author knew that it meant "red rooster", and it would not list "kài nì" because he would have not been able to understand the Dictator's explanation.

And moreover it is quite possible that his native language was not a major European language. (That could explain why it has been so difficult to identify the language of the month names.)

All this to say that his glossary would have been of limited use for himself, but practially useless for any other European readers.  What those readers would need was a comprehensive dictionary from phonetic "Chinese" to a major European language.  But the first one, (Mandarin-Latin) was compiled and published in Rome only in the late 1500s...

For example, if we replace the Reader with the Teacher: ...

Indeed, there are many other possible scenarios. Offhand, I cannot rule out this alternative one.

the Teacher insists that the book cannot be translated from laconic Chinese into a European language without losing most of the meaning

Or, rather, neither he nor the Author could translate most of the terms.

All the best, --stolfi