The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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 right, we are going in circles.  It seems that you will never accept anything other than a perfect solution -- without ambiguities, assumed errors, variant spellings, etc. 

Well, I believe you will be disappointed.  Even if the SPS is not the SBJ and the COT is false, the solution will have to look just like this.

So I can only say that you should stop reading this thread now, and come back only when I am done -- or I have given up.

[Your approach] has not given way to any sort of hypothesis about Voynichese phonetics

Yes, you must admit that it is a situation that no one expected.  I have the complete translation of the SPS, including the four missing pages, and know (as well as possible) who is the author and when and where it was written.  But I still don't know the language and the spelling system.

As for Japanese, this is wrong. [...] 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.

Sorry, I still don't understand your objection.  While some on-yomi readings like 学="gaku" now have two or more syllables, most have only one.  (And maybe in 1400 a Japanese scholar may have read 学 as "gak" not "gaku".  Who knows.)  

Anyway, this point is not important. @jonas_barnun observation just added Japanese on-yomi to the list of 50+ candidate languages.

If the COT and this putative 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?

Because the structure of the Voynichese words strongly points that way.  Independently of the COT or the SST.  And, again, Japanese on-yomi is mostly monosyllabic.

you're the one automating the search with an algorithm, which you say is a misguided conception of the problem?

There will not be a *decription* algorithm, that takes an arbitrary Voynichese text and outputs a plaintext in some known language.  

There will not even be a *validation* algorithm that verifies whether a given plaintext is a valid "decryption" of a given Voynichese text.

What I have is a *matching* algorithm that tries to identify which of 243 parags of the SPS is the Voynichese rendering or a given entry of the SBJ, given the Chinese text of the latter. It does not give a categorical answer, but only a measure of the badness of fit, based on the discrepancies between the spacings of certain keywords in both texts.  

When I am lucky, it finds one match that is much better than all the others.  

Other times it does not find any decent match.  Considering that I can search only 243 of the estimated 365 parags (~67%), this should happen at least 33% of the time.  Depending on the keywords that I specified, it may not find any match at all.

Sometimes it finds two or three parags that match the entry reasonably well.  This typically happens with entries of middling size (which therefore may have half a dozen candidate parags of about the right size) and that have only one or two occurrences of the current set of keywords.  Since the entries have a very rigid structure, it does happen that two entries have the same number of diseases, and thus their 主治 keywords end up in about the same positions.  I am counting those cases as failures, until I can find more cribs that will let me refine the match.

Right now, of 52 entries I tried to match, 22 failed (42%), of which maybe half a dozen are multiple matches. So obviously I didn't give myself enough slack...

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?

I became convinced of the COT around 2000, because of the statistics of the text -- including the distribution of lengths of word types and their structure.  Since that time, its central claim was that Voynichese was an East Asian monosyllabic language in a phonetic encoding, not encrypted.  The story about dictation to a traveler was only meant to show that the central claim was plausible.  Besides the statistics, there were other bits of clues supporting the COT, such as the Zodiac with 24 equal parts and the big red glyphs on f1r.  That evidence was enough for me, but evidently not for anyone else.

I don't recall when I learned about the Shennong Bencaojing and noticed the coincidence of its reported number of entries (365) and the estimated number of parags in the Starred Parags section (300-400). It was many years ago.  At that time, SPS=SBJ became just a side guess attached to the COT.  But back then I had lost interest in the VMS because the COT meant that I lacked the knowledge needed to go any further.

It was only very recently that I got a digital copy of the SBJ and (thanks to Unicode, and Unicode support in python) could verify that the histogram of recipe sizes matched quite well the histogram of SPS parag sizes, after adjusting for the lost and mangled parags.  

And it was only even more recently that I figured out the first "crib"  主治 = daiin by comparing the longest SBJ recipe with the longest SPS parag.  

As I explained, strictly speaking, logically the SPS=SBJ claim is independent of the COT.  But obviously is a huge rock of evidence in its favor.

Now let me say this: of all the theories I have seen since I "discovered" the VMS in 1998, the COT is the only theory that [a] is compatible with everything we see in the book and everything we know of its history, [b] is historically, psychologically, and pragmatically plausible, and [c] satisfactorily explains why someone decided to create a manuscript like this, and spent so much time on it. 

The various hoax/gibberish theories, for instance, fail [a] and [b] in several ways, and fail completely at [c]: they cannot explain why the Author would have decided to create a fake book like this.  They are like claiming that a banknote forger would spend 6 months carving and etching a crude master stamp to produce some fake Monopoly money.

All the best, --stolfi