The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Orthographies have clear rules for representing language, though. ... The hypothesis of a made-to-purpose script would cut very hard against a complicated, inconsistent script, all else equal.

Quite the opposite.  

The "ortho" in that word refers to an external standard of how to "properly" encode sounds.   But if the Author invented the script for his own specific use, it is expected that he changed the rules as he went along.  There would be no "ortho".  Like, at some point he may have decided that a sound distinction was not phonetically significant or worth recording. Like the two sounds of "th" in English, or the stress position and the "ò"/"ó" distinction in Italian.

Or he may have alternated between two ways of writing the same sound in his system.  Like Lewis and Clark sometimes writing "mountains" and "distance" as "mountans" and "distans", "breakfast" as "brackfast", and "buffalo" as "buffalow", "buffaloe", or "biffalo". (Although the last one may be an error by the digital transcriber.  Something which we know is plentiful in the VMS.)

Either of these two possibilities is in fact my preferred explanation for the A-B "language" difference.  It does not seem to be really a language difference, because You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I would be surprised if similar plots can be obtained with two distinct languages -- even with Spanish and Portuguese, even if transcribed in the same phonetic notation.

But even accepting the possibility that The Author, for whatever reason, made a complicated script from scratch

I see no evidence that the script is complicated.  I bet it is much simpler and neater than Latin spelling.  It should be about as phonetic as the Turkish script (which was invented in the early 1900s), or pinyin, or the modern Vietnamese script; but the glyph shapes, since they were not constrained by tradition, were probably chosen to have some logical relation to their sounds -- like the Shavian, Inukitut, and Korean scripts.

On the other hand, the language itself must have been phonetically complicated because of tones and consonant distinctions that the Author may not have been fully able to hear.  (I lived 13 years in the US, yet I still cannot hear the difference between the vowels of "man" and "men" -- the firmware driver in my ears maps them to the same Portuguese "é" (Italian "è") phoneme before the words reach my dictionary lookup unit...)   And because of phenomena like tone sandhi.

Since you like traditional characters, I suppose you are familiar with the way tones are encoded in Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR, = Guóyǔ Luómǎzì in pinyin), so you should understand how complicated the encoding of tones in Voynichese may be.  

And GR still encodes tones, like pinyin; but maybe Voynichese encodes pitch levels instead (which is my wild guess for the roles of the glyphs a, o, y).  If this is the case, the placement of the pitch codes would be somewhat free, and pitch codes could be omitted depending on the pitch or adjacent words.

the fact that you have been unable to penetrate it

I think I went at least as far in that direction as I could be expected to, considering that I don't speak any Chinese language.  

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the current edition of my old crust-mantle-core model) seems to be as good as it gets.  It may be somewhat worse than Zattera's in terms of which words it allows, but it seems to be more logical and more likely to lead to uncovering the phonetic values of the glyphs and digraphs.
 

it is a problem for your theory, not for your critics.

Well, that is your opinion... 

--All the best, --stolfi