The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

You don't mention here that the Gwoyeu... alternative uses Latin characters, but is very frequently doubling vowels and consonants to transport the special emphasizing details of Chinese.

You mean, like Voynichese has double and triple es, hs, and is?

Voynichese seems to be free of any interpunctation

This is what the Shennong Bencaojing "rooster" entry would have looked in the original:

   丹雄鸡味甘微温主治女子崩
   中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血
   通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼肪
   主治耳聋肠主治遗溺肶胵裹
   黄皮主治泄利屎白主治消渴
   伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子
   除热火疮痫痓可作 虎魄神
   物鸡白蠹肥猪生平泽

Except that each row would be a column, and the columns would be ordered from right to left.   So the Dictator would certainly not say "丹雄鸡, colon, 味甘, comma, 微 period".  And so the Author would have hardly known where to insert punctuation on his own.

or even anything like "i dots"

And that is part of the reason why he did not use Latin letters: they are too slow to write.  In his alphabet, most glyphs (even t, k, and Ch) require only one or two strokes simple pen strokes.  Sh requires 3 because of the diacritic plume, and CTh etc require 4.

So your claim is that somebody produced his own "private pinyin" ~150 years earlier before the today known first try? (Ricci)

Yes. For the same reason that Ricci created his proto-pinyin: because he was not fluent in the Chinese writing, and knew that anything written that way would be inaccessible to his intended readers.

The creation of pinyin (or the Vietnamese script) did not depend on any prior development.  Pinyin could have been invented by a Phoenician 3000 years ago. The only thing that Ricci needed was the motive.

Marco Polo is a nice-to-have, but I did not hear about any tries of Chinese transcriptions from him, so maybe this is just name-dropping.

He is just the most famous example of hundreds (if not tens of thousands) of Europeans who traveled to "China"  and lived there long enough to be in the situation proposed by the Chinese Origin theory.   By "China" of course I mean any East Asian country with a monosyllabic language.  Marco may have been too occupied with his jobs at the Court, and probably also with Chinese girls (he was 21 when he got there) to undertake the "VMS project".  But any other traveler who spent years there around 1400 could have done so.

Well, the Starred Parags section [SPS] is definitely not about European people, places, or events.

You can't say this.  How can you "definitely" exclude any european content from any paragraphs?

Well, all analysis and statistics I have done so far is consistent with the SPS being nothing more than a transcription of the Shennong Bencaojing (SBJ), in some as yet unidentified language and script.  The SBJ is supposed to have 365 recipes, which is just about the estimated number of SPS parags before the loss of those pages.  The distribution of lengths of the surviving SPS parags matches that of the lengths of SBJ recipes.  Of the 30+ attempts I did so far to find SPS parags matching SBJ recipes, about 20 yielded a parag that clearly matches the recipe; and there is no sign in the parag of any extraneous text.

It is theoretically possible that the Author replaced some SBJ recipes by parags with similar size and structure, of his own or taken from some European source.  Alternative recipes, prayers, gossip about a improper dealings of a certain papal candidate with a secret fraternity of five dirty nuns who fantasized about warm baths.  But I have seen no evidence for that yet...

any figures (like Jesus, Angels, Saints, pagan Gods, Celebrities or even normal people) are nearly always presented within the "own" ethnicity in a very lot of medieval artwork.
Depicted figures look very often like their cultural environment, by hair, colour, clothing, time period, weapons & tools etc.

Quite true.  This is a copy of a painting by Paul Veronese that my mom did.  Can you tell which Biblical scene is being depicted here, and who that lady is supposed to be?

   

500+ quite european VMS figures, whatever they are intended to show, bring a quite high probability that this manuscript was made also by and for Europeans; somewhere.

And that is in fact what the Chinese Origin theory proposes!

All the best, --stolfi