The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

 a big problem here is you clearly do not understand the significance of your own examples.

Sigh.

No, it is you who is not understanding anything of what I am doing and proposing, no matter how much I try to explain.  Do you even want to understand?

It seems clear to me that you do not care about the Chinese Origin theory, or the SPS=SBJ claim, or even about the Dictation Scenario.  It seems that your only goal here is to declare that I am completely wrong about... something, I can't really figure out what.  Prove me wrong on this...

For the billionth time:

I am providing those readings of SBJ recipes in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, etc only to (a) make my posts a bit less forbidding to those readers who (like me) cannot recognize the hanzi from memory, or see the difference between 主 and 生, and to (b) give them a feeling for what a phonetic transcription of the SBJ would look like in some generic East Asian monosyllabic language.  

I do not use those readings in any way in my analyses and attempts to determine the correspondence between the SBJ and the SPS.  For that I use only the hanzi text of the SBJ and the Voynichese EVA text of the SPS.  I make no attempt to map either of them to sounds. 

The Chinese Origin theory (COT), the SPS=SBJ claim, and the Dictation Scenario are three distinct independent theories.

• The Chinese Origin theory says only that Voynichese is an un-encrypted phonetic transcription of some East Asian monosyllabic language using a phonetic script or shorthand.  The main evidence for it is the word structure and various statistics of the text, including many statistics (like the apparent absence of grammar) that have been claimed to exclude a natural language in the plain or with a simple substitution cipher.  The similarity of the Big Red Weirdos of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to upside-down Chinese characters, and the parallel between the 24x15 division of Zodiac and the Chinese Solar Terms are not claimed to be main evidence; they are just two bonus bits of evidenciary candy. 
  

• The SPS=SBJ claim says that the Starred Parags section is a transcription of the Shennong Bencao Jing in a mostly one-hanzi-for-one-word fashion, minus the Nature, Alias, and Provenance fields, and some non-medical comments in some entries.  Specifically, that it is a transcription of the SBJ text that was quoted in white-on-black in a printed edition of the Zenghe Bencao that was available in 1400 CE.  This claim does not specify any particular language or encoding, except that each hanzi seems to be consistently mapped to the same Voynichese word -- at least for the some common words, and modulo some spelling variations of still undetermined cause.  In particular, it says that the hanzi 主 is usually transcribed as daiin or slight variations thereof. The evidence for this claim is the surprisingly accurate matches between the positions of 主 and other key hanzi in several recipes and the positions of daiin and other specific Voynichese words in some SPS parags.
  

• The Dictation Scenario proposes that the draft of the Starred Parags section (and possibly the rest of the VMS) was created by an Author who could not read Chinese characters but had some mastery of a spoken East Asian language, by taking dictation from a reading of the SBJ (and possibly other books) by a Dictator who could read the Chinese characters and say them loud in that same language.  The draft would then have been transposed to vellum in Europe, several years later, by an European Scribe. The purpose of this Scenario is only to show that the two theories are historically and practically possible; that is, there is at least one plausible way that they could have come to be true.  Therefore it does not need to be proved; it suffices to argue convincingly that it indeed could have happened.
  

Neither the COT nor the SPS=SBJ claim require the Dictation Scenario to be true, and the evidence for them does not depend on it.  But the Dictation Scenario, as a side effect, also provides explanations for some observations made in the exploration of those theories -- such as the large number of "errors" (variants) of spelling and word spacing.  And for why the VMS uses an original alphabet, and why the alphabet looks like that.

Strictly speaking the COT and the SPS=SBJ claims are logically independent: either one of them could be true even if the other is false.  But of course if the SPS=SBJ is true, the COT becomes much more likely, and vice-versa.

Consider that just a few days ago I introduced this quote from a linguist:

Again, that may be true, but it is totally irrelevant to the COT, the SPS=SBJ claim, and to the Dictation Scenario.  How scholars would normally read the SBJ aloud has no implications for any of them.  In the Dictation Scenario, the Dictator would not even have to know the "Classical reading"; he would only need to know (or guess) the general meaning of each hanzi, and say that in the local language that the Author spoke.  He may have deviated from the one-hanzi-one-syllable routine occasionally (like read 雄鸡 = "male chicken" as a single syllable meaning "rooster", or 血闭 as some specific syllable or compound for "amenorrhea" that did not include the syllable for  血= "blood"); but the evidence for the SPS=SBJ theory indicates that such deviations were rare.

I should stop here, but I cannot resist commentinig on the following quote:

But any literary Chinese text has a perfectly specific spoken form, composed of morphemes many of which occur in modern spoken Chinese and all of which are etymologically identifiable with morphemes that have occurred in spoken Chinese at some historical period:  there is a well-defined way of reading a literary Chinese text aloud (morphemes which are obsolete in spoken Chinese are given the pronunciations that result by applying subsequent sound-laws to the pronunciations the morphemes had when they were current in speech),... 

Yes, I am well aware that scholars in each country of the Sinosphere have a longstanding consensus about how to read Classical literature.  Like Egyptologists have a longstanding consensus about how to read hieroglyphs, and Sumerologists have the same about Sumerian.  And like linguists have a longstanding consensus about the lexicon and grammar of Proto-Indo-European.

But just being a long-standing widely adopted consensus does not imply that a hypothesis is true.  Especially in linguistics.  

All those readings may be supported by valid linguistic theories, but are ultimately a pile of arbitrary conventions.  Those scholars don't really know if the conventional pronunciation of the words, the meanings that are conventionally assigned to them, and the conventional parsing of the words into sentences are those that the authors actually meant, thousands of years ago.  The phrase that they all confidently read as "a stone mason" may have been actually "a crude statue" or "the cruel official" or "the stoning of a slave" or "the girl with hard heart that I passionately love but who does not correspond my love".   

And that is particularly true of Classical Chinese, because the Egyptian and Sumerian scripts were at least partially phonetic and could in principle record inflections and auxiliary particles that early Chinese script may well have omitted.  

If you think that this is a "blasphemous" claim, see the recent discussion about why Medieval depictions of Moses have horns...

But, again, this point has no implications for any of the three theories above, or fof my analyes and proof attempts.