An experiment with phonetic writing

[rikforto]

According to proponents of the Chinese theory, VMS is problematic due to phonetics. The author clearly perceived Chinese in his own way, with a “European” ear, and we cannot know how accurately he represented what he heard (for example, the speaker might have been reading quickly, and the author might have taken two similar characters for one word).

A point I would make about this, not just for the particular theory there but anyone going down the route Voynichese is "phonetic [insert choice here]", is that to understand the language you must be able to distinguish between phonemes. I'd certainly expect a small rate of errors as well as idiosyncratic choices in theorizing them that might look different from how modern linguists or how the native informants would explain the phonetics, but that is constrained by the fact that taking as much dictation as is assumed all but implies a reasonably good faculty with the language. And for Sinitic languages, this unavoidably means identifying the tonemes in practice with a high degree of accuracy. The alphabet design and the dictation process would both require that the people involved could in fact make these distinctions to claim the result is "in [insert choice language here]". I find the other possibility, that they were just taking down sounds, and badly, hard to credit.