The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[JoeyB]

Thank you for sharing, I pivoted and went to voynich.nu and looked at the ZL 3b file and followed up on the daiin positional questions. One thing that stands out (and the idea of looking at this positional issue is NOT unique at all I completely recognize) is when daiin is the ending word what word holds the penultimate position and is that regular enough to inform some more structure. And to be clear I mean physical line endings here just like any document, so ZL3b shows:

Penultimate word / Lines / Ends in daiin / %
chol / 43 / 10 / 23%
otol / 13 / 3 / 23%
dy / 18 / 3 / 17%
shol / 19 / 3 / 16%

that's wild! it goes down to dy next at 18 / 3 / 17%. Tiltman and others definitely flagged that certain words prefer front, mid, back positioning, so nothing new conceptually here. But digging into the examples for chol etc right before daiin:

f35v.19    schokey chol daiin
f37v.23    yto chol daiin
f47r.9    chaiin okal chol daiin
f49v.26    otol chol daiin
f56v.16    chol chol daiin
f16r.8    shotchy ydain yky shody otol daiin
f42v.2    dshey tchey y kchey chtchy dan dain otol daiin
f15v.8    ytchor chor ol oiin oty shol daiin
f20v.4    sho or aiin shol daiin
f22v.14    olshly shol daiin

And this is mainly herbal, and then pharma right. Why is herbal signaling the word before daiin the most? In other sections, those same words don't. So is daiin in sps marking a field but daiin in herbal is "caused" by the penultimate word or is grammatically required? And chol is wild, it occurs before other words too... but why before daiin 23% of the time and other words 77% of the time. Some preference but not a rule, a predictor but not a trigger.

Now I need a glass of wine... lol

FIRST: which SBJ or ZHB version is the right comparator. And SECOND, whether the source text could have existed in the 'right form' around 1400. And I definitely don't have anything useful to add there.

The answer will require a rather long post; it will come.  But in brief: as @richforto noted, the version of the Shennong Bencaojing (SBJ) that became the Starred Parags section (SPS) or the VMS was not the "reconstructed" file that I had been using, but a version that was embedded in some later materia medica; most likely the Zhenghe Bencao (ZHB), which was composed around 1080 CE.  On block-printed copies of the ZHB circulating in the 1300-1400 CE time frame, the SBJ text would have been clearly marked out by being printed in double-size font and white-on-black instead of black-on-white.  Thus a doctor or scholar who had a copy of the ZHB could have read it out aloud easily, excluding certain ~500 CE additions that had become as "sacred" as the SBJ itself.

BUT, the other issue seems to be more testable: if this is a positional-distance hypothesis, can the method we use to match also recover the rooster/f105v32-38 pair when we run the whole thing blind? Which files shouldI grab for that? EG, compare all SPS paragraphs against all SBJ/ZHB entries without preselecting the rooster pair,

Yes, and and that is exactly what I am doing now for every SPS entry, including the Rooster one.  Except that I am testing only against the 243 "good" SPS parags -- excluding those which have two or more stars on the margin, which presumably are in fact two or more parags run together.  So I expect that at most 2/3 of the SBJ entries will have an identifiable match.

However, the Rooster entry is a very easy case because it is the only one with eight instances of 主. Thus f105v.32 is the only parag with enough daiin to even begin to compete, even allowing for "quillos" like dain, laiin, or kain.  So it easily comes out as the match for the Rooster entry.  I will discuss this in detail later.

Apart from the Rooster one, there are a few SBJ entries with three 主, and  a few with two. The vast majority has only one.   On these, my programs will often find two or more parags that seem to have a daiin (or quillos thereof) at the right places.  So I have to put those entries on hold for now.

On the other hand, I now have a couple more cribs that can be used in the comparison, notably 气 qì (some sort of "vital energy"; sort of like the Western "humors" but completely different).  That is a rather common character in the SBJ, and seems to correspond to chedy (or sometime slight variations thereof, like chdy or cheda) in the SPS.  By including those cribs in the list of keywords to be matched I can often resolve those ambiguities, and make already identified matches more certain.

I started looking at and playing with files in the ic.unicamp....Notes/077 folder but before I go too far down the road, if the method is bad I don't want to keep going, and if there are files that are final versions or authoritative I'd want to use those.

Sorry, those programs and files were not meant for other people's use.  They are still messy and buggy tools that I am using to match SBJ recipes to SPS parags. A task that is progressing, but much more slowly than I hoped, for reasons that I will detail later.  Feel free to use those programs, but I cannot guarantee them.

All the best, --stolfi