The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Or that the Voynechese is not phonetical at all?

From a purely rhetorical standpoint---I've made my doubts about the identification itself abundantly clear and have nothing new to add at this time---I think it bears mentioning how much strain the "SPS = SBJ" identification puts on what I took to be basic tenants of the "Chinese Theory":

1. Voynichese is phonetic; see above
   
2. Voynichese word breaks delineate syllables; Tiltman's "suffixes" are treated as words to get enough -aiin-type endings in the Rooster identification, though I am aware that another theory properly on another thread underwrites this
   
3. Voynichese is "Chinese", better expressed as "From the Mainland Southeast Asian Language Area"; Japanese largely lacks finals and is very amicable to Romanization, though I do recognize other proposals are still in play)
   
4. "Chinese"/MSEA Languages account for the low entropy; the many-to-one match system destabilizes the connection with the entropy data
   

The COT as I understood it was supposed to put constraints on how the identification of a text like the Shennong Bencaojing would be done, and important constraints are being relaxed or discarded in this discussion. I understand this might be a case where the correct conjecture was made for incorrect reasons---the many bad arguments for heliocentrism should be familiar to most Voynicheers as an example. However, as someone who lent "the COT" a lot more goodwill than you may realize on the grounds that it really does kind of look like Pinyin or chữ Quốc ngữ, it seems like most of the reasons I did so are not relevant to the identification here. That's all conceptually before we rehearse all the reasons I don't think this identification is proved on its own terms, so, paradoxically, I think accepting "SPS = SBJ" increasingly looks like rejecting much of the "Chinese Theory".