09-05-2026, 11:38 PM
Jorge, we are going in circles. You know full well that I don't think random chance explains the finding because I don't think the identification has happened by chance. You are at some pains to argue that the "trimming", editing, and many-to-many matching process that you have constructed is logically justified. Accepting all those arguments, which I don't, you posited a loose correlation between 主治|主 and [dklrs][ao]ii?i?[rn] because they are common and fairly evenly spread through the text. If I am reading your notation correctly, the Voynichese there corresponds to 120 different words and taken together they represent something around a high single digit percentage of tokens in the text. Yes, this is an astounding range of variation! The same can be said of 氣, which "only" has 24 associated words but includes the entire extremely common "ched" and "shed" "families" including their "ee" variations. You constructed this extremely permissive structure because of patterns you observed in order to explain those patterns, I do not think it is surprising that you are finding some matches.
By your own admission, this wide net has not been working as well as you hoped and needs some kind of refinement. It has not given way to any sort of hypothesis about Voynichese phonetics but it has generated a number of questions about why recurring phrases cannot be extended. This seems well in line with what I'd expect if these were spurious correlations because you'd overfitted the model to your hypotheses. I've laid out various other pieces of this in other parts of this thread.
As for Japanese, this is wrong, both as a description of the conversation here and of the language:
Otherwise, I'm not sure I have the thread of our disagreement here. I'm not contending that you need to have an automatic process for decryption, so I'm not sure why that has come up. Asking for any kind of description of how Voynichese works and bridges with a specific text (not the idea of a family of texts) falls well short of that demand. If the COT and this putitive match with the Shennong Bencaojing are independent, that would explain why you are maintaining Japanese as a possibility, but in that case, why not simply drop the contention that Voynichese is monosyllabic? You equivocate enough on the spaces I'm not sure if you're maintaining them or not. Like, you plainly say you are, but then seem to defend the idea that you can ignore them after all? If you're not practically respecting them in your algorithm---and this is another thing, you're the one automating the search with an algorithm, which you say is a misguided conception of the problem?---are you not disregarding spaces in practice?
The reason I brought up the rhetorical perspective is that I'm struggling to fit all these positions into a coherent position. I have problems with many of the pieces, but I am struggling to articulate what you actually think the case for this being a "Chinese" text is. It's not great that every time we go around on this we get bogged down in questions like, "Was the Gregorian calendar in use in 1420?" and "is Japanese monosyllabic?" and "is it still vaginal discharge if you forget to mention it's women who are experiencing the discharge?" But also, I am not clear which arguments you're maintaining and if you think they actually matter. Rhetorically, why not embrace the irrelevance of the COT if you think the SBJ identification doesn't hinge on it? What rhetorical purpose did all that energy you spent defending the Chinese interpretation serve once you pointed out you didn't need to maintain it to defend your proposal of a Chinese origin? Which positions that you've made matter and which ones should we be weighing here?
By your own admission, this wide net has not been working as well as you hoped and needs some kind of refinement. It has not given way to any sort of hypothesis about Voynichese phonetics but it has generated a number of questions about why recurring phrases cannot be extended. This seems well in line with what I'd expect if these were spurious correlations because you'd overfitted the model to your hypotheses. I've laid out various other pieces of this in other parts of this thread.
As for Japanese, this is wrong, both as a description of the conversation here and of the language:
(09-05-2026, 08:58 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't understand what you mean by "lacks finals". As @Jonas_Barnun explained, if the Dictator was Japanese, he probably read each Chinese character as a single syllable, with its "Chinese" reading. So that "Japanese" language would be essentially another "dialect" of Chinese.Jonas did not say this, and it is incorrect; onyomi are quite often two or three syllables. Finals are the Chinese rhymes/rimes and one of the foundational idea behind all attempts at creating descriptions of the phonology and alphabets. There are equivalents, and the term is used to describe them, in most languages throughout the MSEA language area. The complexity of these finals, and the ways they get Romanized, significantly contribute to the lower entropy of texts Romanized to describe them. Japanese does not have these complex finals, and when the onyomi were borrowed, the checked tones were reanalyzed as multiple syllables. It results in a very different sort of phonology, and one that fits the Latin alphabet remarkably well and was natively written with just 48 characters made for expressing foreign sounds quickly.
Otherwise, I'm not sure I have the thread of our disagreement here. I'm not contending that you need to have an automatic process for decryption, so I'm not sure why that has come up. Asking for any kind of description of how Voynichese works and bridges with a specific text (not the idea of a family of texts) falls well short of that demand. If the COT and this putitive match with the Shennong Bencaojing are independent, that would explain why you are maintaining Japanese as a possibility, but in that case, why not simply drop the contention that Voynichese is monosyllabic? You equivocate enough on the spaces I'm not sure if you're maintaining them or not. Like, you plainly say you are, but then seem to defend the idea that you can ignore them after all? If you're not practically respecting them in your algorithm---and this is another thing, you're the one automating the search with an algorithm, which you say is a misguided conception of the problem?---are you not disregarding spaces in practice?
The reason I brought up the rhetorical perspective is that I'm struggling to fit all these positions into a coherent position. I have problems with many of the pieces, but I am struggling to articulate what you actually think the case for this being a "Chinese" text is. It's not great that every time we go around on this we get bogged down in questions like, "Was the Gregorian calendar in use in 1420?" and "is Japanese monosyllabic?" and "is it still vaginal discharge if you forget to mention it's women who are experiencing the discharge?" But also, I am not clear which arguments you're maintaining and if you think they actually matter. Rhetorically, why not embrace the irrelevance of the COT if you think the SBJ identification doesn't hinge on it? What rhetorical purpose did all that energy you spent defending the Chinese interpretation serve once you pointed out you didn't need to maintain it to defend your proposal of a Chinese origin? Which positions that you've made matter and which ones should we be weighing here?
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)