The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jonas Barnun]

Hi Stolfi,

I am really impressed by the amazing work you are doing on this. It's quite something, I have deep respect for that!

That may be bad news, because it removes one possible explanation for why it is hard to find correspondences.  Possibly the language is not a Chinese "dialect" but some non-Chinese language like Vietnamese of Tibetan.  But then I would expect the inconsistencies would be bigger.

Second thought, I am wondering if Japanese might have the properties you are looking for? From what I know, Japanese has been heavily influenced by Chinese, but they have 2 families of reading for each character: the onyomi, which is derived from the Chinese pronunciation and the kunyomi, derived from their vernacular local pronunciation. Example: 山 = moutain is "San" in Onyomi (from Shan in Chinese) and "Yama" in Kunyomi.

They also have a tradition for reading Classical Chinese texts which is quite fascinating as they would spontaneously replace and substitude each character to Onyomi and Kunyomi depending on the context (as a rule of thumb but don't quote me on that, I'd say if a character is alone it would be more Kunyomi, and if two characters composing a concept it would be more Onyomi but there are probably a lot of exceptions and this is just my own interpretation). The result is while reading a Classical Chinese text, a Japanese reader would switch from Onyomi to Kunyomi pronunciations depending on the context for each character. To add to the complexity, it's not uncommon for a character to have different variations of Onyomi and Kunyomi pronunciations. This leads to a lot of variability for a same character in the case of a Japanese reader. Unfortunately my knowledge on Japanese is limited, I am not able to tell how a Japanese person would read the Shennong Bencao Jing.

So far the cribs I have are 

• MAIN-USES: 主治 or just 主 in the SBJ, daiin (and variations) in the SPS
  
• QI:   气 in the SBJ, Chedy (") in the SPS
  
• MAKES:  令 in the SBJ, Ched (") in the SPS.
  

One small remark, if the original language used in the VMS is Chinese, that 令 and 气 would have a relatively close orthography would be quite surprising, as 气 is pronounced Ki in older Chinese (Tchi in mandarin today), while 令 starts with L and is normally a longer word (Ling / Lian). So it could confirm the language used here is not directly Chinese? Or one of the two is not a good match? Or that the Voynechese is not phonetical at all?

For instance, in the Rooster alone, as you can see in that write-up, I must accept dair and laiin as variations of daiin. In the Flying Squirrel entry I must accept dain.  And the pairing of those two entries with f105v.32 and f112v.35 is practically certain because they are lone outliers in the respective parag length distributions. 

Assuming the original language is Chinese, I would not be too bothered by some level of variations for a same word if transcribed phonetically because even today while mandarin has been pretty much standardized, prunounciations may fluctuate especially to an untrained ear (example, what a Chinese person considers as the B sound can sound like P or B to a Western ear, D can sound like D or T, J could sound like a Z or J, some dialects mix L and N). So this part is not a strong issue.

Kind regards,
Jonas