The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

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.

So.. when the VMS author read their shiny new phonetic script out loud .. they wouldn't understand hardly any of the important medical words? Having a perfect phonetic transcription (which is extremely unlikely) would also have been basically useless back in the west, unless you bought a local back with you to interpret what you say. So I still don't understand the how this voynichese text would have been useful in any meaningful way. 

And if the answer to this is that saying the words out loud would help him remember the spoken word and it's meaning, he must have had the meaning explained to him anyway.