The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

You know, a script vs a cipher thing is one of my "fixations" that I developed while working with Rohonc Codex 

Yes, I am constantly thinking of the Rohonc example.  The proposed origin situations are similar in some aspects -- at least to the extent that in both there was the goal to encode a language that could not be adequately written with the Latin alphabet.

But cipher doesn't have to be complicated. A cipher may be simple substitution, a sign for a letter. In such case when you memorize the signs you can write with the same fluency as when writing in standard script.

Sure, but very early on it was determined that Voynichese is not a simple substitution cipher for any "European" language.  

There were three possible conclusions from that fact: it is a complicated cipher, it is meaningless gibberish, or the language is not "European".  For some reason, everybody rejected the last one...

Why Linear B, Cherokee Syllabary or even Rohonc Codex (if I am right) aren't ciphers? Because just like you have a first language so you have a first script and it was the first script for their users.  And If I understand the Chinese theory correctly, Voynichese wasn't a first script for anyone there.

But there are plenty of examples of new scripts developed for languages that already had a "first script".  The modern Vietnamese script replaced a script based on Chinese-like word signs. Same for Korean hangul and Japanese hiragana (although the latter just complemented the Chinese signs, did not replace them).  Or the Shavian alphabet.  A verson of Cyrillic replaced the Mongolian script for the Mongolian language. In the early 1900s Turkey junked their Arabic-like script for one based on a modified Latin alphabet. 

As I understand in this theory some European traveller wanted to have a copy of some Chinese treatise. Somehow he didn't chose the most obvious options:
- he didn't write it down translated to his own language

 
Because he could not read the Chinese characters; and even if he did, he would not know the names for most of the remedies and diseases in his own language.

he didn't write it with original Asian letters

For the same reason that he did not just bought a copy of the book. Because such a copy would be totally useless, to him or anyone else, when he got home.

he didn't write it transliterated with Latin letters

Because there were tones and strange sounds that he presumably felt would be too complicated to encode, and/or because a Latin-based script would take too long to write under dictation.  Which may mean that Voynichese is a bit more a stenography system than a "normal" script.

People are usually "lazy" and do their job with as little effort as possible. Here he seems to break this rule.

On the contrary, I think he chose the most efficient way he could think of to achieve his goal.

Some explanation could be that he wanted to hide the meaning.

I definitely reject that idea.  On the contrary, I am sure that he developed the new script (like others developed  pinyin, hangul, etc.) as a way to make the language more accessible, to himself and presumably to others.

By the way, strictly speaking the "Chinese Origin" theory that I have been proposing since the Mailing List days (traveler in "China", dictation by a native, European scribe working form draft, etc.) is distinct from the claim "SPS=SBJ".  The latter has the evidence I found and presented last month. The former is just the hypothesis that I find most plausible given the belief (now fact) that the language is East Asian in a phonetic encoding.

All the best, --stolfi