14-05-2026, 08:36 PM
I cannot believe I'm about to say this as The Voynich Ninja's Most Vocal Chinese Theory Detractor™, but I am going to suggest running this again with a two changes:
I'm not sure if you need a larger corpus, but it might help. (Doesn't someone have that?) At any rate, the finding breaking across all nuclear vowels has enough in common with Voynichese to warrant putting the best version of the test through, I think
- Break it on <a> not <i>. The letter <i> in Pinyin can be a medial as well as a nuclear vowel, so it can appear in any of three central "slots". I wouldn't have expected <i> to act like Voynichese <k> simply because it's not being used consistently the way the slot alphabet model predicts
- Use an encoding with tone numbers (e.g., mei2). This adds a tone slot and decreases the number of choices for the vowel slot by like a factor of 5, the net effect being it acts more like a Voynichese slot alphabet.
I'm not sure if you need a larger corpus, but it might help. (Doesn't someone have that?) At any rate, the finding breaking across all nuclear vowels has enough in common with Voynichese to warrant putting the best version of the test through, I think