The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Why didn’t he do something simpler: take a copy of an ancient Chinese book back with him, or print one, or even copy a medicinal book word for word without missing a single character? He could have taken it back to his own country and found a relevant diplomat or a scholar who knew both languages to translate it. Wouldn’t the result obtained that way be more accurate? Wouldn’t it be less likely to produce misleading errors?

Because he (like Marco Polo and other Medieval Western travelers to China) had learned the spoken language to some extent, but could not read Chinese characters; and no one in Europe could either.  So a printed copy of the ZHB or any other medical book would have been totally useless to him (or anyone else) when he got back to Europe.

If I come across an English word I don’t know how to pronounce, I used to use Chinese that I could understand to write one or two words. Reading these words together sounds close to the pronunciation of that English word I couldn’t pronounce. But this can only serve as my method for practicing spoken English and reading words.

And that is what I think the Author did, only in reverse. 

The problem is, if they tried their best to write down the same pronunciation, why did they still invent their own alphabet? Isn’t that more error-prone or more complicated?

For the same reason that people invented many You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. systems: because writing with the Latin alphabet is too slow for taking down dictation (especially for a language that has "foreign" sounds).

On the average, a Voynichese symbol requires fewer pen strokes than a Latin letter.  Most symbols, like a o y d l r s Ch k t can be written with only two strokes of the pen each.  Only Sh requires three strokes.  The "platform gallows" CTh and CKh require four strokes each, but they could be two phonemes each, Ch+t and Ch+k.

All the best, --stolfi