The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

He must understand the meaning of the words, without necessarily knowing how to write them down. Otherwise, it turns out that the author went to China, learned the language at least somewhat, but in the end wrote a book that he himself doesn’t understand at all

Most of the words in the SBJ are names of plants, minerals, animals, diseases, or health benefits.  They were written ~300 BCE,  Even traditional Chinese doctors today cannot identify some of them.  Yet the SBJ is still read/copied/printed in its entirely (apart from accidents of manuscript copying and print editing).

Linguists routinely copy down the speech of "natives" that they barely understand. 

(Once I remotely helped a poor linguistics student in the US whose thesis was about an extinct Native American language.  His material was a bunch of stories dictated by native speakers to a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer in the 1800s. The transcripts had been subsequently typewritten, then copied to a filing cabinet full of punched cards, then transferred to mag tape, which was then read to disk.  Needless to say, with tons of errors added at each step.  I could help him because I still knew the EBCDIC punched card code and thus I was able to correct at least those errors that resulted from the card reader missing a hole.)

(The Pirahã are a tiny tribe in a remote corner of the Amazon.  The language is famous because it is claimed to have no words for numbers, not even for '2'.  The number of linguists who understand the language is less than or equal to 1.  In the mailing list days I corresponded privately with Jacques Guy about the language, because the linguist who made that claim -- Daniel Everett -- got his PhD here at the University of Campinas, and his thesis -- printed non-commercially by the University press -- seems to be the only document with something that could be generously called a description of the language.  According to the intro of the thesis, his field study spanned 2-3 months; he would travel by motorboat from the nearest town to the Pirahã riverside camp, interact with natives for a few hours, and go back to the town -- because the Pirahã had no huts, only some improvised shelters made from branches.  The language is tonal and it verb system is very complex, with almost a dozen suffix slots to indicate all sorts of aspects, like "I saw this myself" rather than "I heard from someone" etc.  Everett at the time had no field experience and apparently did not know any native American language.  Even if he did follow that routine every day, you may wonder how much of the language he managed to learn, without any interpreter or bilingual native.  Curiously the number of tones and the verb suffix system in his thesis do not match what was recorded by another linguist who had briefly studied the language some years earlier. My personal opinion is that he never really learned the language.  Including their words for numbers...)

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an excerpt of the Lewis and Clark diaries (1804).  Note how Capt. Clark struggles to record phonetically the names of places and tribes and other terms in languages of which he has at best a very imperfect knowledge (including, apparently, the English one).  

Even the Hebrew Bible has words whose meaning is now uncertain or unknown. 

This is gradually turning into a Chinese fairytale rather than a Chinese theory...

On the contrary, that scenario is perfectly realistic.  Much more plausible than all "encrypted" or "gibberish" theories...

Hieroglyphs and letterforms remain the most suitable explanations for these glyphs. They appear at the beginning of paragraphs, are separated from the letters, and are highlighted in red. Among other things, they are drawn in three‑dimensional form.

But the Scribe surely could read ornate Latin letters.  The glyphs are definitely not Latin letters nor embellished Voynichese glyphs.  So, if they are ornate letters -- which script could they be from?

There’s no explanation for why they’re so poorly copied

They went through at least two steps of copying, probably three: the Author copied the characters to his notebook while in "China"; then, back in Europe, he copied from notebook to the final draft, and then the Scribe copied from the draft to the vellum.  The Author could not read Chinese characters and surely did not know the mechanics of drawing them with a brush.  The Scrube probably had never seen any Chinese writing in his life.  

and why only here? Did the author just not bother to add more Chinese characters to his little Chinese booklet?

Why would he copy more? Those three were presumably copied only for decoration.  Like someone might copy a few runes on the cover of a the book about Vikings, even without understanding them.

(But maybe there were more recognizable Chinese characters, or definitely Chinese details in the missing folios -- and that would be why they went missing...)

All the best, --stolfi