The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

One can learn a language to a level approaching that of native speakers, even without explicit schooling, if one lives in their midst long enough.  Especially if the person is young and did not get there with family.  

Marco Polo claimed that he learned four languages during his Asian travels, including Persian and  Mongolian (but not Chinese).  He seems to have been quite fluent in the latter, enough to conduct diplomatic missions for the Khan, and could read the Mongolian script (which is mostly phonetic, not ideographic like the Chinese script)  That is believable, since he was about 20 and single at the time.

If the VMS Author lived in "China" for a few years, he would have learned more than how to buy food and lodging.  He must have spent hours each day chatting with other people in pubs and restaurants.  He must have made a few local friends, traveled around a bit, maybe even got a local girlfriend or wife.  He probably converted to the local religion and attended their rites.  

And, if things happened as proposed in the Dictation Scenario, the Author could well have asked a local doctor (the Dictator or someone else) afterwards about the meaning of some of the syllables, compounds, and phrases that he did not understand at the time. Like, what sort of medical condition is 贲豚 -- literally, "scampering piglet".

In such a case, why create a phonetic script at all? If the fundamental idea was to store the meaning of the symbols, why not just write the meaning of the symbols in plaintext next to the symbols?

So instead of: "'Chinese' Symbols" -> "Audible 'chinese' (dictator)" -> "Phonetic Symbols (voynichese)" -> "Audible Voynichese (author)" -> "Maybe Understanding"

you would have: "Unknown Symbol+Understanding" -> "Remember spoken 'chinese' for that word" -> "Audible 'chinese' (author)"

That way, taking chinese symbols back would actually represent a huge value to anyone interested in the eastern world. Some chinese writing would be understood for its meaning (including extremely important common verbs), and the VMS author would be able to start slowly working on a way to write chinese phonetically if he wished to do so. Alternatively, they would have been able to simply teach people how certain symbols are pronounced, so that they might be more prepared for future eastern travels. 

Proper nouns would require some kind of phonetic transliteration at some point of course, but those could surely be approximated in plaintext too? That was often done in arabic just fine. Creating a consistent phonetic alphabet instead would have been far longer and more difficult.