The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[chenxiang]

I have seen some of your translations of Classical Chinese sentences and characters, and they are correct. This shows that you also have a good understanding of Chinese.

Thanks for checking, but they are not "my" translations. As I wrote before, I don't speak or read any Chinese or East Asian language, not even enough to say "hello"; except for a tiny bit of Japanese and a couple dozen hanzi.  All the translations that I have posted were provided by internet tools, like Google Translate, ChatGPT, and Gemini (Google's LLM). 

Fortunately, knowledge of Chinese (or whatever is the language of the VMS) is not essential for the work I am doing now.  I need translations of the recipes mainly let me identify parts that the VMS Author apparently left out, like the "flavor" (辛),  "another name" (一名) and "provenance" (生), and some comments that do not make sense outside China, or even inside it; like 东门上者尤良 about chicken heads.  The translations provided by Gemini have been sufficient for that purpose.  But Gemini often makes mistakes or just makes stuff up,so I may need to consult you eventually. 

what kind of help do you need most? For example, checking Chinese texts, comparing specific passages, finding references, or something else?

My biggest problem is that I don't have an adequate digital file of the Shennong Bencao Jing (SBJ) as would have been available to the Author. 

As I wrote before, it seems that he transcribed the SBJ as it was quoted in some medical encyclopedia available around 1400 CE, most likely the Zhenghe Bencao (ZHB).  Specifically, the text that was printed in double-size characters, white-on-black, as seen in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

I  started this investigation using two files that claimed to be the SBJ: one from a site called the Chinese Texts Project (CTP), and the other from the Chinese Wikisource archive.  But then I found that those files were modern attempts to reconstruct the book as it would have been in 200 CE or so, and (apart from having quite a few errors) differed from the text quoted in the ZHB in several critical details.  For instance, where the ZHB-quoted text uses 主, those two files used 主治. And 主 = daiin is still the most important "crib" (hanzi-Voynichese pair) that I have at the moment.

So now I have switched to an HTML file that claims to be the whole text of the ZHB (well over 1000 recipes) -- not images, but the hanzi, in Unicode.  In this file, there is markup identifying the large-character parts, but not the white-on-black subset.  Possibly that file was derived from a copy of the ZHB that was printed after ~1700 CE, when printers dropped the white-on-black convention and used black-on-white for everything.

So at present I must take one recipe at a time, extract the large-font text, and then ask Gemini to identify the parts that were white-on-black in the older printed copies.  Gemini has access to literally thousands of articles that discuss the ZHB and the SBJ in great detail, so apparently it knows which are the parts I need.  But it makes mistakes half the time, contradicting itself, sometimes even in the same sentence.  So I must ask almost one word at a time, and and challenge it with the text from the CTP. 

"Which parts of this recipe were white-on-black?" 
"These parts: ..." 
"But the CTP file does not have these two characters ... Is it incorrect" 
"You got me there, yes, indeed those two characters were black-on-white."
"On the other hand, the CTP file has a few more characters after ..."
"Indeed, I was wrong I missed these 5 characters: ..."
"But the last three are harvesting instructions, that are usually black on white, no?"
"Ah, yes, you are so smart! Indeed, that was black-on-white."

And so on.  When I ask ChatGPT to confirm Gemini's answers, they often disagree.  This process is tiresome and takes about half an hour to one hour per recipe.  I did some 50 recipes so far out of the ~365 that are supposed to be in the SBJ.

So one BIG help I need is to locate a similar digital file of the ZHB, extracted by OCR from an older print, that has the white-on-black text marked out.  Do you know if such a thing exists?

If possible, could you give me one concrete alignment example: one passage from the Shennong Bencao Jing, the corresponding SPS paragraph, and how the symbols/words correspond?

Yesterday I posted to this thread the SBJ entry for 粟米 = "foxtail millet" and the SPS parag that starts at line f107v.20, which I believe is its transcription.   The approximate correspondence is given as text and graphically. 

I would especially like to know: Is there a stable mapping from VMS symbols to Chinese sounds?

No.  All I know is that each hanzi of the SBJ usually corresponds to one token (word) of the SPS, and about 5 EVA letters on the average.  And the structure of Voynichese words has been studied in detail, and seems to be generally consistent with a phonetic writing like pinyin, jyutping, gwoyeh romatzy, the modern Vietnamese script, or the Burmese, Tibetan, and Thai traditional scripts.  Namely, there are Voynichese symbols that occur only at the beginning, only in the middle, and only at the end of each word, with certain rules about which symbols can follow others.  

Spaces in the Voynichese transcription files are notoriously unreliable, so the correspondence 1 hanzi = 1 word is only very approximate.   The correspondence 1 hanzi = 5 EVA letters seems to be more solid, but only in the average.  It is likely that some hanzi will be found to map to a single EVA letter, while others may map to words of 6-7 letters or more.  

Were the omission rules fixed before the comparison, or adjusted afterward?

The main omission rules (for "flavor" and "provenance") where deduced when I compared the longest SBJ recipe ("red rooster") to the longest SPS parag (starting at line f105v.32).  I noticed that the spaces between the 主 characters in the SBJ text matched the spaces between the daiin (and variations) in the SPS, considering the 1:5 ratio above; but the initial and final SPS gaps (the EVA strings before the first daiin and after the last one) were way too short.  

Looking at the translation I guessed that the VMS author had omitted the "flavor" field 味甘微温  and the "provenance" field 生平泽 from the SBJ entry.  Deleting the first made the initial gap almost correct (7 EVA letters instead of the expected 3 x 5 = 15).  But the final gap of the SPS parag was still too short, even assuming that "provenance" was skipped.  Checking again the translation I guessed that the VMS author had omitted also the text 鸡白蠹能肥脂 = "chicken white grub can fatten the fat", which, according to Gemini, was incomprehensible even to Chinese doctors in the 1400s.  Deleting that text (which had no 主) made the final gap almost right.  Deleting also the comment 神物 = "[amber is] a divine substance" made the final gap almost perfect -- only 1 EVA letter too long.

Luckily for me, the CTP file that I first used to search for the "rooster" recipe lacked the comment 东门上者尤良 = "those [chicken heads] hung above the East Gate are particularly potent [for killing ghosts]".  When I switched to the ZHB-quoted text, that comment appeared, and then the gap between the first and second daiin became too short.  So I deduced that this comment too had been omitted by the author.

Based on the Rooster and a couple other cases, I decided to assume that the "flavor", "provenance", and "another name" ( 一名) fields had been systematically skipped by the Author on all SBJ entries.  Thus now I always delete those fields before looking for the matching SPS parag.  

Some entries have suspicious non-medical comments, like the "East gate" above, which may or may not have been omitted.  In those cases I must try both variants of the recipe, with and without that comment.  Usually at most one of the variant.

All the best, --stolfi

Hello Professor Stolfi,

I am really sorry to hear about your painful experience with Gemini and ChatGPT! As a Chinese speaker, I completely understand your frustration. AI models often hallucinate when dealing with ancient Chinese texts because they don't truly understand the historical printing formats like "白底黑字" (black characters on a white background) and "黑底白字" (white characters on a black background).

Your request is very clear. Unfortunately, I cannot immediately give you a ready-to-use OCR file with those specific markers, but I can tell you exactly how to find it, and I am willing to help you search on Chinese websites.

Here is my advice for your next step:

Don't rely on AI for the text structure. Instead of asking Gemini "which parts are 白底黑字", you should look for scanned images of the original book. The book you are looking for is likely the "重修政和经史证类备用本草" (the famous 晦明轩 edition of the ZHB).

Where to look: You can ask Chinese scholars or search on Chinese digital libraries like "中国哲学书电子化计划" (CTEXT) or "识典古籍". However, the "白底黑字" format is a specific visual feature of the physical print.

How I can help you: If you can send me screenshots or PDF pages of the specific ZHB recipes you are working on, I can try to help you read the layout, or I can post on Chinese forums asking for a specific digital archive of the "晦明轩" print.

I am still a beginner, but I know how to navigate Chinese internet. Let's work on this together. Please send me a sample page first so I can see exactly what you mean by "black background and white characters"!

Best, Chenxiang