The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

But that is in fact how most theories scientific theories are developed!  

Scientific theories have something to rely on. I would even say that it’s not assumptions that are made, but interpretations in favor of the theory.

No, check again how theories, especially decipherments, are arrived at.   

IIRC, when Newton came up with the gravitation theory, there were multiple different estimates for the radius of the Earth and the distance to the Moon.  He chose the two that made his formula work for both the apple and the Moon.

One could say that absolutely everything is tailored to fit the theory.

"Absolutely everything?" Aren't you exaggerating just a tiny little bit here?

Unlike most other theories, SPS=SBJ has practically no choice about the text.  It says that every parag of the SPS is the phonetic transcription of some SBJ recipe, as quoted in the white-on-black text of the ZHB.  It says that certain fields, that made no sense outside TCM, were systematically omitted from all recipes; and that other occasional comments that also made no sense outside China (or even within it) were omitted; but the rest of the text of each SBJ recipe (medical indications and benefits) occured in the matching SPS parag in the same order, almost one token for each hanzi.  

The mapping from hanzi to EVA is not one-to-one, but it is not arbitrary: the observed variants of daiin and other keys are explained by similarity of shapes (which explains why daiin can become kaiin but almost never taiin).  The equivalence of "ir" to iin" has the same explanation, but was suspected earlier from analysis of the word structure and the frequencies of the "coda" elements "iin" etc. 

By the way, the Chinese theory doesn’t explain why this book was written.

Quite the contrary.  The Chinese Theory is the only one I have seen in all these ~30 years that offers a plausible explanation for why this book looks like it does and why it was written.

Theories that assume it is an encrypted European language cannot explain why one would encrypt the entire 200+ page book with a method so sophisticated that not even the NSA and Bletchley spooks could figure out anything about it.  If the goal was to hide some "dangerous" stuff, why did the Author then add bizarre illustrations that would have attracted attention and suspicions?  ("Those naked women must be witches celebrating a black sabbath.  Off to the stake with him!")

Why would the Author invent a completely new alphabet, with fewer letters than the Latin one (instead of more letters, like most cipher schemes did)?  If he reused more Latin letter shapes in his alphabet (besides a, o, e), but with different values, the cipher would not be easier to crack.

Theories that assume that the plants are European cannot explain why the Author would create a new herbal without copying a single plant from other contemporary herbals.  Would he really have original knowledge about all those plants? If so, why are the plants so hard to identify, and why they have so many improbable botanical structures?

And then we are also to believe that the same Author also had a completely original view of astronomy and astrology, with signs of exactly 30 (or 15) "things" each.  

Most VMS tokens fit a rather constrained structural model.  But a rather large fraction of them violate this model in ways that seem quite random.  The obvious interpretation is that the text has a rather large frequency of "spelling errors".  But encryption methods are usually fragile in that regard, since a single letter error will usually completely change a word with no warning.  Thus encryption theories cannot explain those apparently "random" deviations from the word models.

The Chinese Theory explains all of those puzzlin VMS features with no strain. What point of it do you think is implausible? The hypothetical situation has historical precedents.  The new alphabet and its letter shapes are natural decisions given the situation and the goal. 

For whom?

Baresch himself had an answer for that:

• From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. After all, this thing cannot be for the masses as may be judged from the precautions the author took in order to keep the uneducated ignorant of it. In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value). He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany.
  

If the author made so many mistakes and perhaps didn’t even understand what he was writing, why did he write this book?

A large proportion of "spelling errors" are expected when taking dictation in a language with many unfamiliar words and whose spelling one does know.   

Even with those errors, that was the only option that the Author had to accomplish his goal of bringing some Chinese knowledge to Europe.

All the best, --stolfi