The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Well, but that's just another assumption—that he inserted the “and.” And why? Because he didn't know how to make simple lists in his language?

Because in Chinese to say "red stone, beet, and sesame seed are wart drugs and spleen tonics" one would write just "red stone beet sesame seed wart drug spleen tonic".   

A native speaker used to read the classics would have been able to parse such phrases, and when speaking them he perhaps used pauses as hints.  Like "red stone, beet, sesame seed;  wart drug, spleen tonic"  But even of the Author had a working knowledge of the spoken language, and could get the sense from those pauses, he would find his written transcription as confusing as we do.

That would justify his adding of extra words to make his transcription easier to parse.

It would be easier to say that “qo” is a comma....

In Voynichese, the qo is written always as a word prefix; not as a separator, like the European period and comma were usually written.  

But then you have to ask why he went to so much trouble to write it that way...

If the VMS Author's native language was Arabic, he would have naturally followed the Arabic grammar, where "A, B, and C" is written "A waB waC".

Anyway, the "why" is secondary; what matters is whether "qo" indeed has that meaning, as that example seems to suggest.

All the best, --stolfi