The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Addendum: I have some evidence that makes me suspect that the the q glyph is an abbreviation that means "and".  It seems to be prefixed to some or all the words in a list, except the first one.

For example, the SBJ entry with the longest title (12 hanzi) starts with

  <b1.1.014>
  青石赤石黄石白石黑石脂等...

In modern Mandarin, that would be read as

  qīng shí chì shí huáng shí bái shí hēi shí zhī děng ...

Literally, that would be

  "blue stone red stone yellow stone white stone black stone fat together..."

But the full title, expanded and punctuated, is meant to be

  青石脂，赤石脂，黄石脂，白石脂，黑石脂，等

In Chinese (at least in the SBJ), the compound term 石脂 shí zhī = "stone fat" means "clay".  So the title of the entry actually translates to 

  blue clay, red clay, yellow clay, white clay, and black clay, together:

or 

  blue, red, yellow, white, and black clay, together:

Thus, the title as it occurs in the SBJ is halfway through these two translations: the 脂 = "fat" was factored out at the end, but the 石 = "stone" was not. 

That entry is about clay of five colors.  Each color of clay is a distinct remedy with distinct medical uses, but the 等 = 'together" tells the reader that all five are discussed together in this entry.  (A note at the end of that entry explains that each of these five colors of clay acts on one of the Five Organs - Liver, Heart, Spleen, Lungs, Kidneys - that are nominally associated with those five colors.)

The VMS paragraph that best matches this entry, based on the occurrence and spacing of the known keywords ( 主治 , 气, 久服, and 气 again ) is f104v.22, which begins with 

  ytChedy.qokChedy.qotChy.qokChedy.qokChd.lsaiin.qChor.Sheor.ytaiin...
  
So my theory is that the q is a feature of the Voynichese language, without a corresponding Chinese character, that functions sort of like the wa- prefix of Arabic (ve- of Hebrew, we- of Ge'ez).  Here is what Google Translate gives for that title in Arabic:

  altiyn al'azraqa, waltiyn al'ahmaru, waltiyn al'asfara, waltiyn al'abyad, waltiyn al'aswadu, meaan

If true, that feature may give a clue to the native language of the VMS Author...

(By the way, in English we are taught at school that one should never start a sentence with "And".  However, IIUC, that is in fact quite common in narratives of those "Semitic" languages. There, a sentence-initial "And" should be understood as "Then".  Which seems to explain why that "error" is so common in the King James Bible.)

And , by the way also, the match with f104v.22 would be even better if one accepted lsaiin as a spelling error for daiin. Note that ls and d are in fact rather close in "ink distance"...

All the best, --stolfi