The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

JKP's work You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. showing possibly similar characters.  And one of our discussion threads You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 

Thanks Tavie! 

But finding a similar character or abbreviation somewhere else is not enough.  With zillions of Medieval manuscript online, one will surely find several matches to any glyph with 3-4 strokes.  We saw this happen not only with the big red weirdos, but with every glyph of the Voynichese alphabet...

To be worth of notice, a proposed solution for the big weirdos must include a plausible explanation for why those symbols were put there.  Why would someone place a fancy capital Greek gamma and a Tironian abbreviation for "er" as the ornate initials of those two paragraphs?

If they are abbreviations of the Author's name or the book's title, why write just the initials in big color letters and a "foreign" script, and then write the rest of that info (?) in plain Voynichese letters, not even a little bit bolder or bigger than the bulk of the text?  

The UHT at least has an answer for that question: because those two characters would not be initials or abbreviations, but the whole name of the book or author.  Like 

• Sun Tzu = 孫子 Sūn Zǐ ("Master Sun")
  
• The Art of War = 兵法 Bīng Fǎ
  
• Lao Tzu = 老子 Lǎo Zǐ ("Master Lao")
  
• Way and Virtue = 道德 Dào Dé
  
• Shennong = 神農 Shén Nóng ("Divine Farmer")
  
• Zhenghe = 政和 Zhèng Hé (the 1111–1118 CE period)
  
• Daguan = 大觀 Dà Guān (the 1107–1110 CE period).
  

The Way and Virtue (Dào Dé) is the main text of Daoism, known in the west as Dao De Jing or Tao Te Ching ("Jing" or "Ching" means "Classic Book").

The source for the SBJ around 1400 CE in China would probably be the massive encyclopedia Zenghe Bencao (Materia Medica of the Zenghe Period), first published in 1116; or maybe its earlier edition, the Daguan Bencao (Materia Medica of the Daguan Period), published in 1108; both during the reign of Emperor Huizong.

All the best, --stolfi