The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The matches that I have found so far indicate that, on average, Voynichese uses approximately 5 EVA letters for each Chinese character.   The following pinyin text with numeric tones (which may be the sort of encoding that the Author may have devised, if he was particularly clever) has 39 words and 169 non-blank characters

The average is close, but the spread / standard deviation is a very different story.

The question was whether Voynichese is actually faster to write than a hypothetical alternative spelling using Latin letters, like that one.  When measured in EVA letters it is a bit more expensive, but what if we counted strokes instead?  I don't know.

Yes, that "5 EVA for 1 hanzi" is only average. I didn't try to measure the standard deviation yet.  

I got that average ratio by comparing the lengths of gaps between cribs in matching entries -- between the 主 in hanzi and between the matching daiin in the SPS.  In the "red rooster" recipe the former are 23, 3, 3, 7, 4, 8, 5 hanzi, the latter are 110 EVA letters (should be 115, error of -5), 17 (+2), 22 (+7), 34 (-1), 19 (-1), 45 (+5), 25 (0).   So in the third gap the ratio is actually ~7.2 EVA per hanzi. 

All the best, --stolfi