The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Again, this assumes homophone disambiguation, which is the entire ballgame here.

Sigh.

In the proposed scenario, the Dictator was asked to read the SBJ in the local language, possibly the only East Asian language which the Author could understand.  If that language had been modern Mandarin, the Dictator could just have said "dān xióng jī".  The Author would then have written down the sounds "dān xióng jī" in his phonetic notation. 

And that is it.  Why is this so hard to understand?

Again, everything else you wrote and quoted may be correct, but it is totally irrelevant. 

If the local language had been Spanish, the Dictator could have said literally "rojo macho galina", or may have tried to finesse the local grammar and said "roja macha galina" or "galina macha roja" or "rojo galo" or "galo rojo"; and the Author still could have written down what he said.  Or the Dictator may have said any of the above, and the Author, having understood that those words meant "red rooster", may have written any other version.  

And there are indeed signs of such occasional "non-literal" readings in the SPS.  On the corresponding parag, f105v.32, the Voynichese title is just poar.keeo - only 8 EVA letters instead of the expected 15.  That could still be three syllables -- po, ar, keeo -- that happen to be all shorter than average.  But maybe the local language had a single-syllable word for rooster, and that is how the Dictator read 雄鸡. 

I already mentioned that 血 occurs twice in that recipe, as 止血 = "stop bleeding" and 血闭 = "blood blockage", less literally "amenorrhea" (skipped menstruation); but there there is no word in parag f105v.32 that repeats exactly at the right places.  It could be that the Author wrote the syllable for 血 as oteey the first time and ockhey the second time. (See the "buffalos" of Lewis and Clark.)  Or that the Scribe misread the Author's handwriting.  But, based on tentative matching of other recipes, it may also be that the Dictator read 血闭 as a specific word or compound that means "amenorrhea" and does not contain the syllable for "blood".