The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Full meaningful phrases from a number of recipes would be more convincing than just daiin and chedy coincidentally being closely aligned without having to stretch dar, dair into it.

Well, I have full translations of several paragraphs (including f105v.32) into Chinese characters. And also the translation of the whole section (including the four missing pages!), except that the paragraphs are scrambled in some still unspecified order.

In my mind, if it was based on an Asian language, even if the author was being dictated to, there would be some Asian influence to his writing like a consistent stroke order that resulted in readily recognizable and distinct glyphs or words.

Sorry, I don't understand this objection. In the proposed scenario, the Author was not Chinese, and resorted to the dictation + phonetic notation solution precisely because he did not understand the Chinese script.  In his phonetic alphabet (or shorthand system) he clearly chose glyphs that would be easy to write: mostly with 1 or 2 short strokes, rarely 3, adequate for writing with a quill rather than a brush. 

And the glyphs we see in the VMS are not his handwriting, but of the Scribe who put his draft to vellum.  And the Scribe was definitely European, drawing "inspiration" from other European manuscripts that could be found in an European library.

Ie. I think there is a clear difference between r and n.

The proposed confusion is not between r and n, but between r and in.  Like the easy confusion of European scribes between "m" and "in" or "ni" (which is the reason with the "i" got its dot), not between "m" and "n". 

The glyphs n and r surely were distinct in the Author's mind, and in fact the alphabet seems more logical if r was not allowed in the "coda" part of the words.  The confusion would have been only in the Scribe's mind when reading the Author's draft.

None of us can truly claim to be on the right track if we’re proposing a solution until we can consistently show a set of simple rules that result in a clear set of phrases, sentences and paragraphs.

That is what one expects that the solution to a cryptographic puzzle will look like.  But this is not an unknown cipher, it is an unknown language.  With a complicated and inconsistent script, with many errors.  In these cases, even when if one happens to have the plaintext, building a dictionary will be a slow process, perhaps never completely finished. 

All the best, --stolfi