The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I had hoped analogy would prove useful, and that I would get a direct answer to a direct question, but it seems not.

I cannot give a direct answer to a question that assumes a faulty premise.

Anyway, I will reply to your last post separately.  Let me remind you and other readers that this discussion has absolutely no relevance to the SPS=SBJ claim or to the proposed "dictation" scenario, because 

1) The SBJ that is homologous to the SPS was written in Chinese characters with the syntax of some language that was spoken around ~300 BCE.  Not with  Mandarin syntax or Cantonese syntax. So the question of how similar these two are is totally irrelevant.

2)  The syntactic structure of the SBJ is extremely simple. Most sentences are just very short noun-adjective or verb-object constructions.  Thus the grammatical differences between that archaic language and the local language in the 1400s would be hardly noticeable, and would be the least of the obstacles to comprehension.

3) The metrics strongly indicate that the mapping from the SBJ to the SPS was close to one character -> one spoken syllable -> one written Voynichese word.  (At most there may have been translations of some 2- or 3-hanzi compounds, like reading 瘀血 using the local reading for 血 but reading 血闭 using some other syllable, or vice-versa.) Thus it is pointless to conjecture about whether the Dictator should or would have freely translated the text, instead of just read each character in the local spoken language. 

All the best, --stolfi