The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I’m not entirely sure why the underlying syllables have to be Asian in origin

Well, if the text matches a specific Chinese document practically word for word, that conclusion seems all but certain.

But if you don't accept that particular claim, there is still the fact that the length distribution and internal structure of the VMS words is consistent with the structure of syllables, and incompatible with them being polysyllabic words, even under any encryption that maps longer words to longer strings.  

Thus we are left with (a) each word of the Voynichese language is a single syllable, or (b) the words of the Voy ni che se lan gua ge were split into syllables as part of the encoding, or © the encryption algorithm maps words of arbitrary length to strings of bounded length, with a syllable-like structure.

Alternative © would basically be a codebook- or nomenclator-type cipher, where each word is replaced by a number according to a dictionary.  Many years ago I described You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that would produce numbers with a syllable-like structure.

some [languages] would make similar sense to zhu if it was indeed a set of recipes or even if the frequent syllable was a definite article.

The Voynichese daiin (and sometimes slight variants like dain, kaiin and laiin, and the abbreviation dam) does not behave like a definite article.  That hypothesis has been explored an dismissed long ago.  In the Starred Parags section, it does behave like a keyword that comes after the title of the recipe and introduces a list of indications.  Maybe it works like that in the Herbal sections too; I haven't looked into it.

It may be significant that daiin is one of  a very few words that are about as frequent in Herbal-A as in Herbal-B.

All the best, --stolfi