The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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)"

In modern Chinese there are officially 8105 distinct characters, of which ~3500 are supposedly learned by students gradually through the 9 years of compulsory schooling, which ends when they are ~15 years old.  Those 3500 hanzi are supposedly necessary and sufficient to read newspapers and other common literature.    

The SBJ itself uses about 1000 distinct characters, many of which are names of plants or medical conditions.  Many would have been rare already by 1400.  In 2-3 cases, the original meaning of the character was unknown by that time, even to doctors.

There is no way that the Author would have learned the meaning or the pronunciation of more than a couple dozen Chinese characters, even of the ones which he could understand when spoken.  Only a scholar who made his top priority to learn the script (like some Jesuit missionaries did, ~1600) could do that to a useful level; and even so it would take him at least a few years of intense study.

Therefore, the Chinese characters would be useless to the Author back in Europe, with or without the accompanying glosses.

Moreover, writing the glosses would be much harder than what you  may think.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is volume 5 the Zhenghe Bencao (ZHB), the printed medical encyclopedia which seems to be the source from which the Author got the SBJ.  The SBJ is the parts printed in large font, white on black, scattered through the 26 volumes.  A you can see, even if he acquired a copy of that encyclopedia, there would be no space to write down the meaning and/or pronunciation next to each character.

So, in order to implement your suggestion, he would have to copy the Chinese characters of the SBJ by hand.   That is a very time-consuming and error-prone job; just try it. It would easily take him 10x as long as writing down the dictation phonetically. 

Back to Red Rooster recipe: if the local language that the Author could speak was modern Mandarin (which it totally wasn't, but just suppose), this is what the Dictator would have said out loud, reading the SBJ from the ZHB:

dān xióng jī: zhǔ: (nǚ rén) bēng zhōng, lòu
xià, chì bái wò. bǔ xū, wēn zhōng, zhǐ xuè,
tōng shén, shā dú, bì bù xiáng. tóu: zhǔ: shā
guǐ. fáng: zhǔ: ěr lóng. cháng: zhǔ: yí nì.
pí chī guǒ huáng pí: zhǔ: xiè lì. niào bái:
zhǔ: xiāo kě, shāng hán hán rè. hé yǔ: zhǔ:
xià xuè bì. jīzǐ: zhǔ: chú rè huǒ chuāng,
diān jìng; kě zuò: hǔ pò.

The Author probably understood correctly the words in green, because (IIUC) they are all common words like "red", "male", "chicken", "mainly", "woman", "red", "white", "blood", etc.  The others seem to be mostly medical terms that I suppose he would not have learned even after living for years in the place.

And much of that text is 2-3 syllable compound terms whose meaning he probably did not know, even if he got the meaning of the individual syllables.  He probably understood niào (excrement) and bái (white), but he may have not have figured out that niào bái mean the white part of chicken poo, which is mostly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  

According to the SBJ, niào bái is a treatment for xiāo kě.  He may have understood both syllables -- xiāo = "extinguish, consume" and kě = "thirst"; but he probably would not have known that the pair did not mean "satiate thirst", but rather "wasting thirst" -- which my lalamo says is "diabetes".  So recording [his idea of] the translation, instead of the sound, would have been an error that could not be fixed later.

And asking for an explanation of every syllable and compound would have been waaaay too time-consuming

"Wait, stop -- you said 'red male chicken'? Why red?"
"Could be any color, but all things being equal, red remedies are the most powerful.  Every doctor knows that."
"If you say so..."
"By the way, you are paying me per hour, right? Including explanations like this one?"
"Yes, yes, I will pay per hour, don't worry.  Now, would you please start again from the jī?"

Creating a consistent phonetic alphabet instead would have been far longer and more difficult.

Definitely not.  He could have defined the Voynichese alphabet in a couple of hours, and memorized it with a few hours of  practice.

All the best, --stolfi