The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

(long quote with the different colours)

(Emphases and coloring obviously mine.) Notice how succinctly this quote, which was chosen for this reason, covers a number of recurring issues. The red text establishes that we are talking about readings that were not Classical in phonology, but contemporary to the reader, answering your question. The bolded text surrounding it establishes the practice more thoroughly. The blue text gets at the etymological, rather than semantic, nature of reading the characters; to posit a Spanish or Burmese reading of 丹 you need to figure how 丹 was historically pronounced in Spanish or Burmese, not gloss the meaning from a specific language. (Such historical precedents do not exist.) He concludes, in green, that this kind of reading does not serve a communicative purpose in and of itself, as Shira and I have pointed out. He does, in purple, offer something adjacent to your claims that Classical Chinese is "only written", but this is only a practical observation about its possible uses for most literate people, not a categorical exclusion of reading aloud or a diagnostic for the languages in play; Classical Chinese is not transformed into something else by the oration, except "incomprehensible".

I don't want to derail the discussion, but I wanted to ask something about this as I was completely unaware of much of what you presented here. 

If I understand correctly, a learned person reading the SBJ in the 1400s would have potentially understood the meaning of the text. So if they read a sentence and understood "grows on trees in valleys", could they then easily form a grammatically correct spoken sentence in their own local language? Is that what you mean by "translation"?

If that is the only plausible "written characters ---> dictation ---> voynichese" process, how much would the order of the broad content change? (depends on local language? did word order vary? (verb/noun/adjective))

I would imagine that although certain words would not be as perfect a match, their rough position within full recipes may not change that much, nor the amount of times many of the words would be said. "named/called" would still be near the start, for example. Unfortunately, this would likely make it impossible to ever construct a coherent 1-1 translation from voynichese to plaintext, unless we knew the exact language.