The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Worth saying I precipitated this by saying that you have not shown how the text is encoded

Indeed, I still don't know how each Chinese character was pronounced by the hypothetical Dictator, nor how the Author encoded those sounds into glyphs.   But I believe that the evidence is categorical that each Chinese character got mapped to a Voynichese word -- most of the time, and possibly with certain variations that could be errors, sandhi, or inflections.

and you took this to be a claim it's a cipher.

What I meant is that you are still looking at the VMS as a cryptographic puzzle, and therefore you are demanding a solution in the form that cryptographers expect for such puzzles: namely, a fairly complete description of the encoding algorithm, and a full plaintext that results from applying the inverse algorithm to the ciphertext.

Well, sorry, but it is almost certain that there will be no such solution.  For the SPS, and for the other sections.  Because this is not a cryptography puzzle, it is more like a lost language puzzle. Like deciphering a Sumerian, Minoan, or Etruscan text.  What I found is a Rosetta Stone; and even though it seems to be an amazingly good one (long, mostly word for word, etc), building a dictionary for the language and understanding the writing system will be a long and hard process, a few words at a time.

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.

The main difference between an unknown orthography and a cipher is that the latter is usually designed to be non-ambiguous and easily invertibe, which the former is often not.

For instance, the Arabic and Hebrew scripts usually omit all short vowels, even though those may be semantically significant.  Italian spelling does not mark the stressed syllable, even though there are pairs of words like ancora (anchor) and ancora (again, still) that differ only in that detail. The casual English transcription system for Chinese words, like "feng shui", omits the all-important tones.  Even in English you have "read" (present) and "read" (past).

And, as I mentioned before, some stenography systems omit the voiced/unvoiced distinction altogether, and other supposedly essential details (like the final "s" of plurals).

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.

But not every daiin is a 主, just like not every -ed in English is a past tense suffix.  

And, conversely, not every 主 was written as daiin. In the rooster entry, out of the seven 主, one became laiin, another became dair.  Variations which seem quite compatible with in and d being written in cursive handwriting on the Author's draft.  

Again, a messy correspondence like that would discredit a proposed solution to a cryptographic puzzle, but would be quite expected from an improvised transcription effort like it is implied here. 

All the best, --stolfi