The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

reader = Dictator above

Ah, sorry.  Indeed, in that scenario the Dictator did not know or care about the Voynichese script.  He just read the Chinese characters aloud, and the Author just wrote down the sounds.  

I perhaps misunderstood something important here. Are you arguing you've used the Classical Chinese text to identify a translation? Or are you arguing that it is in Classical Chinese, phonetically rendered with vernacular pronunciation? I took from our conversation about Kanbun that it was latter, but you seem to be implying the former now.

All I can say is that the Starred Parags text quite accurately matches the Chinese character text of the Shennong Bencao, as extracted from the Zhenghe  Bencao (ZHB) file, in the sense that the cribs I have identified so far occur in both texts with proportional spacings (at the ratio of ~5 EVA letters to 1 hanzi) -- with accuracy that is very unlikely to be a mere coincidence.  

That is the case for the longest SBJ recipe, the "red rooster" (ROOS) and the longest single-star SPS parag (f105v.32), and for several other pairs as well.  

The cribs are not categorical, though: of the eight 主 in ROOS, five match a daiin in the SPS parag, while the other three match a dair, a laiin, and a kaiin.  All but three of the nine distances before, between, and after these cribs on the SPS -- 8, 105, 11, 15, 46, 19, 43, 25, and 51 EVA letters -- are all less than  ±5 letters away from the expected distances based on their distances in the ROOS recipe (15, 115, 15, 15, 35, 20, 40, 25, and 50).  Those errors correspond ot less than one hanzi in the recipe.  The three exceptions are the gap before the first matched daiin, which is 8 EVA letters instead of the predicted 15 (an error of -7 letters, which is ~1.4 hanzi); the first gap between the cribs, which is 105 letters instead of the expected ~115 (an error of -10, or ~2 hanzi); and the 4th gap, which is 46 EVA letters long instead of the expected ~35 (an error of +11 or ~2.2 hanzi).  There are no other daiin or laiin in that parag; there is only one other dair, that does not match any 主, and four other kaiin. 

Those position matches (and the match between the histograms of recipe and parag lengths) are the facts.  The scenario with the Dictator and phonetic writing is my best explanation for how those facts came to be.  And my theory that the Scribe sometimes misread iin in the Author's draft as ir, and d as k or l, is my best explanation for the variant translations of 主.  There are other possible scenarios, but they seem a lot less likely.  That scenario has at least many historical quasi-precedent: Europeans who lived for years in "China" and learned the local spoken language. And in a few cases, even recorded it phonetically.

Whether the local language was a Chinese dialect or not, the text that the Dictator was reading was almost certainly the text, in Chinese characters, that was quoted in the ZHB or some similar treatise available at the time.  If the local language was a Chinese dialect, the Dictator would surely have read the hanzi in that language.  If the local language was not a Chinese dialect (like Vietnamese, Burmese, Tibetan, ...), the Dictator may have read each hanzi in some pseudo-Chinese (like the Japanese "on" readings) or in the local language (like the Japanese "kun" readings).  At this point I cannot tell which of all these possibilities is the case.

All the best, --stolfi