The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So, why wouldn't something like this be as valid? 2 strong matches linking 主 to "okche" (one is opche, a clear spelling error where the author mistakenly used p instead of k), one faint/weak match (likely due to the uneven spacing of characters on the top row). But more importantly, no leftover instances of "okche" that match to nothing.

That is a very bad matching. 

First because, as you note, the spacing of the proposed Voynchese words (in EVA letters) is too different from the spacing of the 主 (in hanzi scaled by ~5.338).  In a good crib matching the "gap errors" (discrepancies between actual and predicted gap sizes) should be mostly less than ~5 EVA = ~1 hanzi.  

The hanzi gaps before, between, and after the 主 in the recipe are 2, 25, 12, and 2 hanzi. The predicted gap sizes in the SPS are then 11, 133, 64, and 11 EVA letters.  In the matching to f114r.4 that I posted, with the three  主 mapped to those three daiin, the observed gap sizes are 13, 131, 62, and 15 EVA letters.  

So the gap errors for my matching are +2, -2, -2, and +5 EVA letters, which correspond to +0.4, -0.4, -0.4, and  +1.0 hanzi.   Your proposed matching would have gap errors -2, -25, +21, and -1 EVA letters.  Note that, statistically, a measure of the badness of a matching should be something like the sum of the squares of the gap errors. 

Second, the cribs and their allowed "spelling variants" must be the same for all recipes and paragraphs.  The mapping  主 = ~daiin was determined from the Rooster recipe, and there is no viable alternative there.  So the only freedom in this case is the choice of which three daiin-like strings should be paired with the three 主.  

Or a different angle: "Lorem ipsum daiin", where DAIIN is added to lorem ipsum text after every 15 words (after the first). It looks promising.

This is a slightly more pertinent objection, but it still has problems.

That specific "lorem" parag is obviously a bad match because it is way too long; but that could be fixed if you used a an appropriate shorter filler, to match the total size of f114r.4 (236 EVA letters).  

Also note that by conveniently fixing the size of the first and last gaps, you left only two gaps with "random" size; and considering  that the total size is fixed, that leaves only variable to be matched by chance.

A better check would be to generate 43 parags with 236 EVA letters, with six daiin scattered among filler text, in random positions (including the initial and final gaps); and then check how many would allow the three 主 to be paired with three of those six daiin with total square gap size error less than or equal to (+2)^2 + (-2)^2 + (-2)^2 + (+5)^2 = 37.

However, I do not know what your justification is for all of these non matches. In your plot, only 50% of daiins match to 主. The fact that there are 2 instances where daiin blatantly doesn't match to anything, and one instance of a double daiin where none is present in the SBJ is surely strong evidence that there isn't a match.

Homophones are possible explanation, but they should be relatively rare.

A more likely explanation for some of those unpaired daiin is that they are parts of bigger words that are not related to 主.  Like HIS is a word on its own but also part of THIS and HISTORY and CHISEL.

Another, perhaps even more likely explanation, is that the encoding of  sounds to Voynichese is many-to-one.  For example, here is the syllable-by-syllable reading of that recipe in modern Mandarin:
  fēng zǐ wèi gān píng zhǔ fēng tóu chú gǔ dú bǔ xū
  léi shāng zhōng jiǔ fú lìng rén guāng zé hǎo yán
  sè bù lǎo dà huáng fēng zǐ zhǔ xīn fù zhàng mǎn
  tòng qīng shēn yì qì tǔ fēng zǐ zhǔ yōng zhǒng
The syllable fēng occurs four times (three as the reading of = "bee,wasp,hornet" in the three titles, and once as the reading of 风 = wind).  The syllables zhǔ (as the Mandarin reading of 主) and zǐ (as the reading of 子 = "child,egg,larva,etc.") occur three times each.  All other syllables occur only once each.But now consider what happens if we omit the tone marks: 
  feng zi zhu feng tou chu gu du bu xu lei shang
  zhong jiu fu ling ren guang ze hao yan se bu lao
  da huang feng zi zhu xin fu zhang man tong qing
  shen yi qi tu feng zi zhu yong zhong
Now feng, zhu, and zi still occur 4, 3, and  3 times each; but bu, fu, and zhong now occur twice each. Each of them corresponding to two very different hanzi.

Now check the pronunciation of pinyin "x", "q", "c", "zh", "z", "sh", and see how many of them you can tell apart...

Needless to say, I don't know what is the language that the SBJ was dicitated in, but surely it was not modern Mandarin. Thus, it is quite possible that the Author was unable to distinguish the syllables for 主 from the syllables for three other hanzi, and wrote all six syllables as daiin.

In order for this match to be considered a match, in my view 2 criteria must be satisfied: 1) instances of daiin convincingly match to 主, AND 2) instances of daiin do not consistently fail to match to anything

Then I am afraid that you will never see the VMS deciphered...

You have to take into account the probability of the author incorrectly writing daiin (a common word) 3 times, when he is supposed to have a strong enough grasp of the language to be able to consistently understand and differentiate tones.

We don't know whether he was able to distinguish all the tones and other phonemes of the spoken language.  He probably was, because he must have been aware that tones were important, and he would not have undertaken this project if he was not confident that he could distinguish them.  

The SBJ uses ~1000 distinct hanzi, and in my transcription of the SPS,ignoring commas, I count 927 distinct words that occur at least twice. (I count also ~2300 hapaxes, but many are probably "errors" of various sorts, including the result of omitted or bogus spaces).  The count would be a bit higher if the four missing folios were not missing; on the other hand, many of those 927 may be variant spellings (like dain or kaiin for daiin). 

Thus these numbers number may not prove anything, but they are at least compatible with the mapping from hanzi to Voynichese words being mostly one-to-one.

However, the Author may have omitted tone information where he could tell the meaning even without it, just from the context.  Like when people in English write "read" for two different words with different sounds: usually they can tell from context which spoken word those letters stand for.

It's entirely plausible that the VMS is the same type of written content as the SBJ (recipe books for instance), but that recipes themselves have broad shared patterns across many/all languages.

 
That is true; but, as shown, in my comparisons I require that the cribs be at similar distances, not just in the same order.

As for "other languages", it has long been known that the statistics and word structure of Voynichese are incompatible with "European" languages, including Arabic and Hebrew.  The word structure could be explained by a codebook cipher; but the "sentence" structure seems harder to explain under the "European language" assumption.

All the best, --stolfi