The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If i'm correct, Jorge's theory does not rely on mutual intelligibility between different asian languages. It just relies on voynichese being the phonetic transcription of one specific spoken asian language.

Exactly.

That language would have been any of the ones that could understand and read out loud the written chinese language, which the SBJ was written in. The fact that multiple languages could all understand the same text is surely not indicative that the spoken languages were mutually intelligible.

Almost correct.  But for the "dictation" scenario it is sufficient that the Dictator knew the meaning of each Chinese character, and dictated the word in the local language that had that meaning. Even if most speakers of that language could not do the same.  

For example, a medical doctor in Vietnam could be familiar with the SBJ and could read it, or any written Classical Chinese text, and thus could read out each hanzi as a Vietnamese syllable.  Even if he did not know the pronunciation of that hanzi in any Chinese language, and the syntax of the resulting string of syllables would be quite unlike that of Vietnamese.  

(But at this point I still think the language was indeed one of the Sinitic languages, like Cantonese; other monosyllabic non-Sinitic languages, like Vietnamese, seem still possible, but rather unlikely.) 

For example, if I show this:

That can provide a good analogy...  

Suppose that Julius Caesar, during his stay in England, wanted to write that "the house of the king's soldier had a round window":

  domus militis regis fenestram rotundam habet.

But he had too much wine at lunch, so much tha he could not even remember the Latin letters. So he writes in ideograms:

     

Some 2500 years later, Martian archaeologists digging into the ruins of London find that wax tablet.  They can tell that it is some form of writing, but, due to their vastly different neurology and culture, cannot identify any of the objects depicted in those line drawings.  So they recruit one of the local Earthlings and ask him to read that inscription in English (a language which they had learned long ago, when their first radio-telescopes captured the radio broadcasts of War of the Worlds). 

So the Earthling reads

  house soldier king window ball hold

That is definitely not Latin, nor some hypothetical "Classical English".  It is a language with English vocabulary, so the Martians understand all those words, but the grammar is not English. The grammar is not Latin either, because it lacks the all-important Latin inflections that Caesar's "ideographic" writing did not record.  And some of the words used by the Earthling, like "ball", even though they are valid "readings" of the drawings, they are not the ones that Caesar intended.

Yet that dictated English reading would already give the Martians a good part of the meaning that Caesar intended to write down.

Back on Mars, the archaeologists would have to puzzle out whether that inscription is telling of a house-soldier grabbing an obese king through a window or whatever.   Eventually, if they managed to find a few hundred similar inscriptions, they may get a partial grasp of their peculiar grammar, and thus make better guesses about the meanings.

But that "broken English" reading is the best they could have obtained under those circumstances.  It increased their understanding of the inscription from zero to much more than zero.  An improvement of infinity percent...

Back to the VMS and the Chinese Origin theory, the situation would be similar to the extent that the Dictator's readings of the hanzi in the local "Cantonese" would use the "Cantonese" vocabulary, so the Author would understand the words.  But the grammar would not be the "Cantonese" grammar, not even some hypothetical "Classical Cantonese" or "Classical Mandarin", but it would be the syntax of whatever language the Divine Farmer spoke in 300 BCE, which was lost long before 1400 CE.   And it is possible that his spoken language had inflections and particles that he omitted in the writing.

The situation would be somewhat better than that of those Martians because the sentences in the SBJ are much simpler than Caesar's sentence above.  Most are 2-3 words long, such as "stops bleeding" or "pain in the head".  Thus the different syntax would not be a significant problem for the understanding.  

On the other hand, the situation would be worse because the Author's knowledge of Cantonese probably did not include many of the  plants and diseases that the Dictator produced.

But, as in that example, that "broken Cantonese" transcription would be the best that the Author could have obtained in those circumstances.

All the best, --stolfi