The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

... 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, ... while the COT states that Voynichese is a phonetic transcription of a language that mostly uses monosyllable words ... If we take You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as an example ... 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. ... with a word of that length, assuming the manuscript is not a hoax, there is most likely at least two vowels in there somewhere.

The vast majority of the words in the VMS are not only short, but fit You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with restricts the number and order of occurrences of each glyph.  (I have simplified that model a bit since then.) For example, it says that there cannot be  more than one gallows { k t p k }, and most three benches { Ch Sh ee } (counting also the "platform gallows" { CTh CKh CPh CFh }) .  

Those few long words generally violate those constraints, but they look like two or more valid words which were stuck together by the Scribe, for some reason.  That long word you quote does not fit the model, because it has two gallows; but it could be parsed into ypCho.CPheosaiin or yp.ChoCPheosaiin, and both are valid according to my model.  I am almost convinced that CPhe is a single phoneme or diphtong, and iin is a single phoneme, and I suspect that y a o denote pitch levels.  In that case, yp would be a syllable with a single phoneme, like wú, yì, or é in modern Mandarin, while ChoCPheosaiin would be a syllable with four or five phonemes Ch + CPhe + s + iin , like Mandarin chuāng  (IPA /⁵ʈʂʰwaŋ⁵/).

Cantonese syllables seem to be a bit more complicated than Mandarin ones: they canhave six different tones, and the syllable can end in a consonant, like Sun Yat Sen, Chow Yun Fat, and Ip Man (THE man you should call if you are being abused by the internet router mafia).

All the best, --stolfi