The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Battler]

The Hangul writing system assembles letters into syllable blocks with an initial slot, a medial vowel slot, an optional final slot, so text is a linear sequence of internally slotted blocks, which structurally is, in my modest understanding, what Voynichese slot grammar does, at least in principle.

If you treat the jamo as letters, which they essentially are, I would not expect that you get the remarkable structure of Voynichese letter ordering because the finals significantly overlap with the initials. I'm not sure I've seen anyone run the entropy statistics on Romanized Korean text---and if someone is interested in tackling that challenge I have some thoughts about how to do it---but it has a very different quality from Pinyin or Chữ Quốc Ngữ.

That would depend on the romanization. McCune-Reischauer, predominantly used in North Korea, yields neater structure than the southern romanization, and then there's also the second, unofficial southern romanization which is based on English sound equivalently (it's how they end up with eg. Eun-suh instead of Eun-seo, or, in McCune-Reischauer, Ŭn-sŏ).

But statistics should really be run on Korean jamo written in sequence instead of in blocks, rather than on romanized Korean, and if possible, it should be 14th century Korean. Or even better, a Chinese text with Korean pronunciation, for which they back then even invented special jamo for sounds only found in Chinese.

Perhaps the Voynich Manuscript is a retranscription by a European of such a Koreanized version of the Shennon Bencaojing, written by preliminary new Korean writing system devised by King Sejong under European influence before he decided to scrap it and instead come up with Hangul based on Phags-pa (it is theorized that the *guo* script one contemporary Korean source names as the basis may have been a veiled shorthand for *mengguo*, ie. Mongol, as the Mongols used Phags-pa that was originally devised for Tibetan, but it became taboo by that time in the Sinosphere to openly name the Mongols)? The time period fits, and Koreanized Chinese would fit what Mr. Stolfi is saying as well.