The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It is worse with Literary Chinese, where the phonology is decidedly unhelpful in understanding the text. This would be a trilingual endeavour between the speaker's topolect, Literary Chinese prose (which has diverged considerably in grammar and is not readily understood by a listener), and the scribe.

I am aware of all those problems, and the VMS author probably was too.  He would have been as lost as an average English speaker today taking dictation of  the Canterbury Tales. Probably a bit more.  Now an then he may have stopped to ask the Dictator to explain some word or phrase; but if he did that too often he would never finish the job..

Mandarin, in your assumption, I believe?

 
No, as I explained in the previous post,I am not making any assumptions about the specific language.

Dictating this isn't unheard of (e.g. Ministers would dictate Literary Chinese-medium messages to the Emperor, and the Hongwu Emperor did engage in this), but it is not considered realistic for anyone but the most educated of Chinese. It is hard to express just how important the characters themselves are in disambiguating Literary Chinese.

I suspect that his transcription of the Dictator's spoken syllables to Voynichese was not very consistent.  I mentioned before the, even after living in the US for 13 years, I am still unable to distinguish the vowel sounds in "man" and "men".  My ears map both sounds to the same phoneme (like Italian "è") before sending the signal to my brain.  

Likewise I cannot distinguish the four tones of modern Mandarin, or the 2-3 consonants that are similar to pinyin "q".  That is, in all these examples I can tell that the sounds are different of they are pronounced slowly and next to each other, but I cannot tell which is which when I hear them isolated in normal speech.  

Moreover, the Voynichese script was probably designed as a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. system, not as an accurate phonetic notation.  Shorthand systems often intentionally combine similar phonemes, like "p" and "b".  They reli on de fect det aur brein is priti gut et untrstendin spich in speit ov tiverjent pronensietiens ent dielectel influenses.  If the Author did that, maybe he did overestimate his ability to recover the sounds later, when clean-copying his notes... 

I must still question how someone would be a TCM practitioner, know Shennong Bencao and its contents to the point of being able to recite it from memory

That is not the claim!  I now believe that the Dictator was reading the SBJ from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., as would be available around 1400, that quoted the SBJ practically whole, and marked it clearly with white-on-black double-size characters.  

Comparisons of that text with the Starred Parags section (SPS) of the VMS show very good matches of the spacings of certain characters (like 主) and of certain Voynichese words (like daiin) , at the rate of about one Voynichese word or five EVA letters for each hanzi, on average.   Except for the omission of some phrases, some systematic (the Flavor, Alias, and Provenance fields) and some quite justified by their contents (like certain non-medical comments). 

yet not know characters. Shennong Bencao is Literary Chinese and being able to recite it and understand its contents means knowing the characters, or the spoken word would be nonsense.

The Dictator would of course be able to read the characters.  The premise of the Dictation Scenario is that the VMS Author could not read the characters, but had some level of fluency in the spoken language only. 

Say I take this line, with Mandarin Pinyin: ... If I were to render this in Baihua: ... It is considerably different! If this were for someone illiterate in characters (and thus unable to access the classics), this would be very confusing! ... If this were Shennong Bencao translated into Baihua, we would expect to see every line being considerably longer.

I am well aware of the big difference between Classical Chinese (from ~300 BCE!) and the spoken language, even that of ~1400 CE.   But the matches that I got so far strongly indicate that the SPS is indeed a hanzi-by-hanzi transcription of the SBJ as quoted in the Zhenghe Bencao.  Not a free translation into the local spoken language, whatever that was.

(However I suspect that the Author inserted on his own the special symbol prefix qo- between the items of lists, because he found the Chinese way to enumerate things -- without punctuation or "and" -- too confusing.)

This could be why the script never saw documented use again - the idea was bad, so they stopped using it.

I believe that the Author devised the Voynichese script just for that specific project: bring some Chinese books to Europe.   A copy in Chinese characters would have been useless, and a translation would be beyond his capabilities and resources.  A phonetic transcription was the best he could do: back to Europe, his knowledge of the spoken language (and perhaps a separate glossary) would have allowed him to understand at least part of the contents. 

I don't think he intended to use that script for any other purposes, like writing his own thoughts in the local language, or communicating with the locals.

All the best, --stolfi