The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It seems to me that the author simply recorded the sounds without dividing them into consonants or vowels, and indicated the tones at the end. In that case, the transcription would be similar to Latin.

I have not figured out yet what was the phonetics of the language or how the Vounichese encoding works.  I suspect that each of the "elements" in the current version of my old "crust-mantle-core" model is a phoneme, and the single e that can be appended to a gallows or bench could turn it into a related sound -- like turning IPA [ p t k f s ] into [ b d g v z ] etc. Except that I suspect that q is a non-phonetic symbol like our &, and the "circles" { a o y } encode pitch levels.  But I cannot offer any real evdence for these hunches...

We also can't say whether the author wanted to make Chinese more understandable for us. Perhaps his only goal was to convey Chinese phonetics in the most accurate and beautiful way possible, without considering any Latin alphabet.

The assumption implied by my proposed "dictation" scenario is that the Author's primary goal was to record the spoken text in real time, but in such a way that he could read it back later.  

But he may have modified his scheme, at any later time, to make it easier or more accurate for others. Then he would have re-transcribed his notes into this "Voynichese 2.0" before giving it to the Scribe to produce the vellum "edition".

All the best, --stolfi[/b]