The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And [errors] definitely exist, I’m not arguing that. But there’s a problem: when you say that the scribe made mistakes several times, writing the words kaiin, laiin, and dain instead of daiin, that’s an assumption, because it can’t be proven in any way, but without it, the SPS = SBJ theory falls apart.

Again, that is a deduction that follows from noting the positions of 主 in the longest SBJ recipe and which words occur at the corresponding positions in the longest SPS parag.  And besides those specific variations have several a plausible explanations, including the possible similarity of sounds, sandhi phenomena, and the graphical similarity between k, d, and l in the Author's draft.

The author wrote a book in phonetic Chinese on strange folios, contacted various Chinese people to have their works dictated to him, and upon returning to Europe, he decided to abruptly abandon his great endeavor to enlighten Europeans about Asian medicine, hired inept scribes, and made them copy his drafts so that he could sell them...
This is more of a fairy tale than an explanation.

First, note that the generic Chinese Origin theory has now been superseded by the specific SPS=SBJ claim.  The evidence that I used to put forward for the former are still valid, but not as strong as the textual coincidences between SBJ and SPS.

The point of the "Dictation Scenario" was, and still is, only to show that there is at least one plausible explanation for how a Chinese text could end up in Europe, on European vellum and with European parag layout, written and illustrated by Scribe who was obviously European.  That Scenario does not specify exactly how the Dictator was recruited, how the dictation was arranged, etc. 

And that Scenario is not required for the SPS=SBJ claim.  It is only what I think is the most likely history.  The creation of the VMS seems to have involved dictation because of the nature of script and of the "spelling variations"; but the dictation could also have taken place in many other places or circumstances.

For instance, it could have happened in some port of Persia, Yemen, or Northeast Africa, when the fleet of Chinese-Muslim Admiral Zeng He visited those places between 1415 and 1420.  Maybe and one of the many Chinese doctors on board befriended a Caliphate doctor living there.  

Or it may even have happened in Europe, when an elderly Burmese doctor living in Germany dictated it to his German nephew.  

But these alternatives seem much less likely than the one I have been proposing, simply because there must have been thousands of travelers to East Asia that could have been the Author. 

And I see a contradiction — if the author wanted to enlighten Europe with knowledge of Chinese medicine, why, upon returning to his homeland, did he lose hope and decide to simply sell this book?

We don't know exactly why he decided to put the book to vellum, at which age he did so, how long after he got to Europe, how long it took.  

He had to make at least one copy of his notes in order to share them and still keep them.  Maybe he made more copies, on paper and/or on vellum, that have been lost.  Maybe he decided to make a "nice" copy on vellum for sale because of his financial situation.  Maybe he made it to leave it for his heir, who may or may not have been able to read it at the time. 

And why is the explanation “someone wrote a book and encrypted it” suddenly no longer simple, logical, and at the same time obvious? ... it’s a reference guide. You looked at the required plant, looked at the required diagram.

Again: because it does not provide any plausible explanation for why the Author would have encrypted a book of that kind and size, with those illustrations, and that quite unusual alphabet.

It also does not explain how he could have devised an encryption system so complex that it frustrated the best cryptographers for the last 80 years, and yet produces and encrypted text that looks quite like natural language (just not an European one!).

And if you admit that the copy has a substantial number of errors, that is rather incompatible with the text being encrypted.

The encryption would have made the book hard to use.   For the Herbal and Starred Parag sections, that may still have been tolerable.  But the Bio section does not look like a reference text, rather a continuous discourse, with no "tabs" or section headers. To use it, the Author would have to decode large parts of it.

If the book was intended for use by the Author himself, many illustrations and all the blank spaces would be an unjustified waste of vellum and time.  If it was intended for use by someone else, I can return the question: why did the Author decide to sell a book with all his precious secrets?

Copiale cipher

That is a poor precedent for the VMS.  As expected from a book with secret "heretic" information, it has no illustrations.  The alphabet was derived from the Greek and Roman alphabets.  It is in German encoded with a rather simple substitution polyalphabetic cipher with nulls, a method that resulted in a large alphabet (~90 symbols) and was hard to crack but easy to decode once the key was known.  The nulls and the disguised word spaces resulted in an encrypted text that truly did not look like any natural language (not just European ones).

And it was created in the 1800s, when cryptography was already an old and well-known art.

If the author understood what 主 was, but had difficulty distinguishing the sounds, he would probably have realized that kaiin = laiin = daiin, and would have written it down correctly.

No matter how fluent he was in the spoken language, he surely did not recognize many of the words, because they were technical names for remedies, conditions, benefits, or organs used only by doctors, and many of them obsolete.  Thus, if he heard a kaiin he would be unable to tell whether that was a mis-heard daiin which he knew could mean 主, or some disease called kaiin something.  Again, note that in the SBJ the diseases were all strung together with no "and" or other connectives.

But it seems that when the Dictator read a 主, the Author did hear daiin, and wrote that down -- at least half the time.  

But it is also possible (if not more likely) that he did record every 主 correctly as daiin, but the Scribe misread his handwriting on the draft and often wrote k or l for d.

What didn’t satisfy you about my example with Carmen Arvale?

You shoud know why.  Because the coincidence that you showed, unlike those I have been showing, was very likely (indeed certainly) to occur by chance.

You were free to chose the source text (which was extremely unlikely to be have been a source text for the VMS), a specific bit of it, and a specific bit of the VMS text, that would give the desired match.   You did not even match whole parag to whole parag. 

In contrast, I first chose the SBJ mainly because (a) the number of recipes seemed to match the estimated original number of parags (stars) in the SPS, before the loss of the central bifolio; and (b) it was the most likely answer that a traveler in China or adjacent countries would have heard if he asked a local doctor "what is the most important medical book you have that I could copy".  

That was before I even had the text of the SBJ.  That is, I did not choose the SBJ because it gave good text matches.

Then, I choose to match the "rooster" recipe with parag f105v.32 because both were the largest parags in each text, and indeed outliers.  That is, I had no freedom to choose either of the two texts. 

Again, then it turns out that that SBJ recipe has eight 主 whose spacings match very closely the spacing of eight words in the SPS parag, five of which are daiin and the other three are very similar words.

Finally, it is much easier to find a text with six consecutive repetitions of the same word, than to find one with five occurrences of the same word at specific distances -- like 110, 15, 15, and 45 letters apart.   The former is rather common in certain texts like poetry, songs, grimoires, prayer books, etc.  

Ah, comme la vie serait triste
Triste, triste, triste
Ah, comme la vie serait triste
Si l'on ne pouvait pas chanter.
--Boris Vian, Chantez

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
--Shakespeare, King Lear

All the best, --stolfi