The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I tried to map some other words in the rooster. More specifically the word for 鸡, 下 and 子 which each appear at least 2 times in the Chinese.  Are you able to find potential candidates for these characters?

I am trying, but not in a very efficient manner.  I spent a lot of time over the past month trying to automate the matching of SBJ entries to SPS parags, but it is still not good enough. I must improve the metric I use for measuring the quality of the match.  Maybe if I had spent that time doing the matching by hand I would have got more results by now...

One potential problem is that the same Chinese character may map to two or more different words in the VMS language.  For example, take 鸡子 = "chicken child" = "egg" in that Rooster recipe.  If the Dictator who read the book to the Author was Cantonese or Vietnamese, he may have said the word for "egg" in his language, rather than the word for "chicken" then the word for "child". 

Especially the versions of shennong bencao jing are multiple, so the possibilities are also quite numerous on that front as well, we are not talking about a canonical text.

I am aware that there are variations.  For instance, just this weekend I found that in the "cinnabar" recipe, the digital files have a 治 character while other sources have 主. It seems that the former is a relatively modern change, and it would have been the latter in 1400.

An the whole 鸡白蠹 = "chicken white grub" part of the "Rooster" recipe, being related to farming rather than medicine, was probably missing already in the copy that was the source for the VMS.

My digital file has quite a few notations in parenthesis that specify the class of patients for which the following diseases or benefits apply.  Like（女子）in the Rooster recipe.  Those were generally omitted by the Author, and may have been absent from the original source as well.

But so far those variations have been a minor problem.  There are also errors in the digital files available from the net, including a few recipes that were mashed together.

It would be helpful for me to have the rooster in EVA pronunciation (latin characters) to better visualize and avoid the trap of the Voynich script misreading.

Beware that the EVA encoding is not meant to be how Voynichese is pronounced.  It was designed to be almost pronounceable, but only because it was hoped that it would be helpful when transcribing the text and talking about it.   We still have not the foggiest idea of how daiin or chedy were actually pronounced.  It may well be that d is actually a vowel and a is a consonant, or a tone mark...

The EVA text of f105v.32 is in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in the section "Aligning..."

All the best, --stolfi