The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[J_Voy]

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Personally, I don't think that a Chinese theory is likely, my main reason for this is that Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contain the names of some of the months of the year in some sort of Romance language, along with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. containing text in a corrupted form of the Latin alphabet, either way, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is definitely written in an Indo-European language, not a Sino-Tibetan, or to be more specific, a Sinitic one.

In the most general terms, my Chinese Origin theory (COT) says that the Voynichese text is a phonetic transcription of a monosyllabic natural language, not encrypted.  

Under the COT, the only plausible possibilities for the language are East Asan and Southeast Asian languages, including the Chinese languages proper, Vietnamese, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Thai, Tibetan, Hmong, and other more obscure ones.  Thus whenever I write "China" or "Chinese" below, please understand "any one of those countries".

In general, the words of those languages are not inflected for case, number, gender, tense, mood, etc.  They don't use articles and make relatively limited use of prepositions and other connectives, relying instead on word order and context to indicate the semantic roles (subject, object, verb, etc.) of the parts of a sentence.  Since each word is a single syllable, word length is sharply limited, and the words have a multiple-slot structure where each slot can be empty or filled with a limited subset of the phonemes.  All these features are seen in the Voynichese text, and are not seen in "European" languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Ethiopian, etc.

The COT does not say that the Author (who composed the Voynichese text) and/or the Scribe (who copied it onto vellum)  were Chinese, or that the book was written and/or scribed in China.  It admits that the Scribe was European and was accustomed to write in some European language, and that the vellum was produced in Europe. 

There are several possible scenarios for how the basic COT claim above could have become true.  The one which I think most likely is that the Author was a traveler who spent a few years in China, had one or more Chinese books dictated to him, and brought back those dictation notes to Europe; where he hired a local scribe to copy his notes to vellum and draw the illustrations.

The COT does not say anything about non-Voynichese text -- the month names and the "marginalia".  The fact that those are written is (deformed) Latin letters and some (broken) European language does not contradict it. Besides, it seems likely that those text fragments, especially the marginalia, were added by later owners.

All the best, --stolfi

I appreciate the criticisms of my analysis outlined in this post, however personally, I do still find it hard to believe that such a language such as Chinese, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Thai, among others, could possibly be Voynichese, as you correctly pointed out, these languages don't inflect for case, and therefore each word is a single syllable, and while the COT states that Voynichese is a phonetic transcription of a language that mostly uses monosyllable words like these, I still find this hard to believe.

If we take You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as an example, even though we cannot read Voynichese, I can be confident that most Voynichese words are more than one syllable long. In fact, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contains one of, if not the longest word in the manuscript, that being ypchocPheosaiin. Keep in mind, I am not saying that because the EVA transcription of this word contains vowels, the Voynichese word must contain vowels, I am not saying that at all, however, I do say that with a word of that length, assuming the manuscript is not a hoax, there is most likely at least two vowels in there somewhere. 

If the word really is a monosyllable, then that means Voynichese could possibly have extremely long consonant clusters not found in any of the languages mentioned in your post. It seems to me that based on word lengths alone, Voynichese would most likely be Indo-European, now I am also not saying that Voynichese is most definitely Indo-European. If someone managed to prove that Voynichese was one of these languages, I would welcome the solution with open arms, it is just that for the time being, I do not believe that an East Asian langauge could possibly be a solution.


Wish you the best, Sincerely, J_Voy.