The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

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))

It is going to vary a lot! Some of the languages that have been suggested are SOV languages, which should have been immediately ruled out because the cribs should be in VERY different places. (There's some acknowledgement of this from Stolfi at the link I highlighted above, but only after trying to force the issue by asserting a more literal translation is possible.) But there will be other differences that will rearrange and change things. A major typology difference through the region is some words have noun-like attributives and some have verb-like attributives, and that can move stuff around and eliminate or add words if translated to a language with a different approach. But, picking up what you're putting down, yes, it could, in principle, look something like the lines we see in the above graphs---especially if the unused nodes were way less prevalent.

I would take really solid cribs in that manner as "further study warranted" indicator, especially if we are only talking about SVO languages---which the Sinitic languages all are. That is, to a point, a agree with this:

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.

From both ends, I don't think that's what's happening here. On one end, I don't think the cribs are very solid---the texts are both manipulated, there are a lot of arbitrary choices, and the method is generating multiple matches per entry. And at the other end, plainly much stronger conclusions are being asserted. However, if someone wants to start this work afresh and try and unwind some of these assumptions, actually prove correspondence, and purge the theory of the flatly wrong assumption that all varieties of North and Southeast Asian languages are interchangeable at the syllable level, I'll hear the case afresh.

I actually think even if it dead ends, there might be some interesting things to learn from pinyin, jyutping, and chữ Quốc ngữ. (Even though it has different properties, hangeul is also an interesting case study as well as one of the best-documented premodern invented scripts and, while not completely tabula rasa, quite a leap from anything else around it.) And while I think there are huge hurdles to it being phonetic Classical Chinese, there are a lot of other possibilities. I don't think I've used the term "Indosphere" yet, but some of the "monosyllabic" languages are from there, and that's outside my wheelhouse but surely---surely?---there is an herbal tradition there? Do we have any Indosphere nerds on the forum?