The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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, ... 13 actual functioning letters ... if Voynichese does truly have tones, then whatever technique the scribe must have used has concealed those tones pretty well.

Vounichese must have used digraphs to represent some phonemes, like almost all "European" language do. My model has potentially 21 "letters"
   { d l r s } (4)
   { Ch Sh ee Che She eee } (6)
   { k t ke te } (4)
   { CHh CTh  CKhe CThe } (4)
   { n in iin } (3) 
even assuming that { p f } are ornamental versions of other letters, that { m } s an abbreviation, that { q x v } are non-phonetic symbols, that { a o y } are pitch or tone marks, and that everything else is an error.

we only ever have proof that the manuscript was in Europe

The Chinese Origin theory in fact assumes that the vellum copy was made in Europe.

most major European languages don't have tones, now granted, some European languages have tones, such as Swedish

The primary claim of the COT is that the text is a natural language in the plain, and the "words" of Voynichese are words of that language.  In that case, the length and structure of the words implies that each word of that language is a syllable.  The COT does not directly claim that the language has tones or that the script specifies tones.  However, the plausible languages with single-syllable words are all in East and Southeast Asia (including Tibet) , and AFAIK they all have lexical tones (that is, the tone affects the root meaning of the word).

we have no viable proof that the manuscript was ever in Rome and Prague

Maybe you meant outside of Rome and Prague?

The first mention of the VMS is in a letter from a Bohemian (Czech) person in Prague, Jiŕi Bareš (Georg Baresch, Georgius Barschius).  The last mention before Voynich bought it is a letter by Marci, decades later, saying that he was sending the book to Kircher in Rome. Where it presumably sat until 1911 or so.

Moreover, in that letter Barchius says that he had studied at the Sapienza in Rome.  Maybe he got the book there, or on his way back to Prague...

the marginalia to either Scandinavia or Southern Germany

It seems very likely that the marginalia are much later than the main text of the VMS, and there is no reason to believe that whoever wrote them could read that text (any more than Barschius and everybody after him could).  

So, even if we could identify the language of the marginalia, that would not tell us anything about the language and origin of the main text.

All the best, --stolfi