The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

While I do think that this would be a cool idea, I highly doubt that Voynichese glyphs could also represent things like punctuation and tones, this is because as is beautifully demonstarted in this video by Voynich Talk, one of the moderators on these forums, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. assuming every Voynichese glyph represents a letter would result in about 13 actual functioning letters, if he account for things like tone and punctuation, then we would still need this in addition to a full alphabet, if Voynichese does truly have tones, then whatever technique the scribe must have used has concealed those tones pretty well.

Once again, your assumption here is that each glyph is used only in one way.

Another reason I don't believe Voynichese has tones is that we only ever have proof that the manuscript was in Europe, and most major European languages don't have tones, now granted, some European languages have tones, such as Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, among others, however, we have no viable proof that the manuscript was ever in Rome and Prague, and while handwriting analysis done in this video You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. locates whoever wrote the marginalia to either Scandinavia or Southern Germany, now, given the other known locations of the manuscript, I think it is most likely that the scribe who wrote the manuscript was trained in Germany. As is correctly pointed out in the video, just because most handeriting matches were found in Germany, doesn't mean the manuscript was created there, just that the scribe who wrote the marginalia was trained there.

1) We are discussing tones in a monosyllabic chinese, not in a european language
2) As you say, marginalia written later is not necessarily relevant to the origin of the voynichese text

It's just that for the time being, I find it hard to believe Voynichese is a tonal language either.

So you have no idea what the text is, could be a conlang, or gibberish, or a ciphered romance language, or ciphered germanic language, but you draw the line at tones? Why is that any more or less likely than any of the others?