The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Also, I will say, as critical as I am of the Chinese theory, I find a made-to-purpose script to be one of the more plausible elements, though even here it turns out that Jorge and I come to that from entirely paths. Middle Chinese, which was by 1400 was an archaic language but bear with me, had 36 initial consonants and a complex rhyme system. The Latin alphabet is extremely poorly suited to the forms of Chinese that existed in the Middle Ages, and even today Mandarin, which has greatly simplified phonology, strains the Latin alphabet a bit. I think there is something to the point that the conjectured Author might have preferred an adapted Latin alphabet, and that we ought to see more of the Latin alphabet in the script, but all else equal, we would also predict it is quite different, especially if the Author was willing to make radical changes as he played around. The jump to simply creating new letterforms becomes much smaller---though, Jorge, not trivial---in that view.

Tantalizingly, both the consonants and rhymes were described natively by a sequence of phonetic components, and an informant would have been familiar with dictionaries based on those principles. A person familiar with alphabets might represent each of the initials and finals then as a system of digraphs and trigraphs. Unfortunately, when I played around with using Voynichese as a con-script for Middle Chinese and some of the successor varieties, I found I could not account for the variety of Voynichese words. This is not the end of that matter, and hence why I am far less critical of the conjecture that it is a Mainland Southeast Asian language than of the particular identification here, but I will say the alphabet did not immediately suggest itself as a custom-made alphabet for period Chinese varieties.