The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I have a hard time understanding why someone transcribing spoken Chinese would use a wholly novel alphabet. Even if there were sounds that didn't occur in their native language, and they could distinguish them as different, instead of mishearing them as more familiar phonemes, it seems like the simplest thing to do would be to create new characters for those sounds.

Before dictaphones became available, people who had to take dictation routinely -- secretaries, students, law court recorders, journalists -- would generally use some You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. system.  Because writing with Latin letters or any other "official" alphabet, even cursive, would be too slow.

That is probably why the Author decided to invent a new alphabet instead of using his native one.   A notable feature of the Voynichese alphabet is that most glyphs require only one or two pen strokes. 

Sts. Cyril and Methodius did

 

But they did invent new symbols for some letters, instead of using digraphs. And when St. Mesrop (or someone else) had to do the same for Armenian and Georgian, he invented the whole alphabet from scratch.

Even then, assuming they understood spoken Chinese and were having the book read to them, it seems like writing a translation in a familiar language would be far more useful.

Definitely, but have you ever tried translating a text of any length between two very different languages?  It requires good knowledge of both languages, and easily takes 10x more time than writing a phonetic rendering from dictation.  

Most of the words in the SBJ are names of plants, animals, minerals, diseases, or heath benefits.  Many plants would not exist in Europe, and many of the others would be impossible for the Author to identify, even with a detailed description from a local doctor.  Same for the diseases: even if the Author was a physician himself (which he most likely was not), he would have struggled to identify the diseases from descriptions. 

But he would still find it very important to record that bái mǎ jīng was good for fathering children, even if he did not know right there what herb that could be.  He may even have seen an opportunity to make money by taking a barrel of it to Europe, instead of cloves or pepper...

or even transliteration

That would require him to invent Unicode.  That is, assign a different code to each of the ~1000 Chinese characters used in the SBJ, and then map each Chinese character to that code.

And the result would have been just as useless to him as a printed copy of the SBJ -- because he would not know how each character was pronounced, and thus he would not know its meaning.

All the best, --stolfi