The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

 The only reason people even think of cipher is because of that mistaken conclusion that the language must be "European". 

Every time you claim this, I will carry on repeating that it is for you to prove and that you have not proved it.

And every time I must apologize for the sweeping generalization.  Agreed, there must be many people who got to different conclusions by different lines of reasoning.

But somehow they all apparently came to strongly reject the possibility that it may be plaintext in an East Asian language.  Anyone who seriously admitted this possibility would have seen what I see, a hundred years ago.  How did they get there?

Worth saying I precipitated this by saying that you have not shown how the text is encoded and you took this to be a claim it's a cipher. I mean you have not shown how some version of the Shennong Bencaojing has been converted to Voynichese or recovered a version of the Shennong Bencaojing from it even if I accept your tentative identifications. The process you use is not capable of doing that, and has not yet opened an avenue to doing so. I would also note that a novel, undeciphered orthography functions much like a cipher practically, and I don't see how splitting that hair would make the issue that the orthography is undescribed less acute, which is why I let that comment pass initially.

This also isn't the first time I've told you that I am not starting from the assumption that the text is European, and at any rate you have seen me criticize linguistic claims that would back a European origin when I feel those claims are not warranted. I've been candid that I view the Alpine region as "first among equals" when talking about the origin, but my objections to the identification with the Shennong Bencaojing are focused on the substance of those claims, not whether or not the presentation in the VMS supports it. For instance, I think identifying 主 with daiin runs into the problem that daiin is not distributed through the SPS in a way that is amenable to the formulaic use in the Shennong Bencaojing. I have outlined conceptual issues with identifying 主 with a family of Voynich words to get around that. You may find this unconvincing, and I have responded to your justifications for this approach, but importantly these criticisms are not logically dependent on my thoughts about the artifact's origin.

I have some comments about the specific new identification you linked above, but those are going to take a bit more time to write up