The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If he knew a few hanzi, he was by definition able to read and understand the classical text to a certain, limited degree.

Note, here we are discussing some ALTERNATIVE scenario where the Author somehow interacts with the printed text.

The key word in your objection is "limited".

Here is the full Red Rooster recipe, with those fields included.  In blue are the hanzi that I knew before I started working on the SPS=SBJ theory maybe a year ago.  In purple are those that I learned since then, in the process of carefully editing some 70 recipes and their translations:

丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上者尤良
肪主耳聋肠主遗溺肶胵裹黄皮主泄利屎白主消渴伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子主除热火疮痫痉
可作虎魄神物鸡白蠹能肥脂生平泽

And even those I know only in a weak sense, because I could easily confuse them with similar looking ones. 

And most of those hanzi that I recognize are being used there as parts of compound terms that I don't know, or in senses that I don't know.  For example I know that 中 has the general meaning of "center/middle/interior" and related words like "central" or "middle".  But the compound 崩中 means something like "[vaginal] discharge from inside" while 温中 means something like "warming the [digestive] center".   I would never have guessed that.   I knew that 子 has the general meaning of "child/baby", and now I know that it can be also "larva" or "egg", but I still haven't memorized that 鸡 means "chicken" , so I would not recognize 鸡子 as meaning "chicken egg".  

Basically, the only words I sort of accurately understand in that whole recipe are 女人 = "woman person", 头 = "head",  杀 = "kill", and the field keywords 味, 主, 生.

If someone read that recipe aloud to me in any Chinese language, living or extinct, "Classic" or colloquial, I would not recognize or understand a single word of it.  If someone showed me the modern Mandarin reading in pinyin I might recognize a couple of syllables like jī = "chicken", zhǔ = 主, nǚ = "woman", and bái = "white"; but I would not be sure about the tones.

On the other hand, someone who lived for a few years in any East Asian country should have been able to recognize al lot more spoken syllables and compounds if that recipe was read aloud in the local language, even if syllable by syllable.   He surely would have understood the parts in green below, and recognized the syllables in purple even if he could not recognize the compounds they were part of:

丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上者尤良
肪主耳聋肠主遗溺肶胵裹黄皮主泄利屎白主消渴伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子主除热火疮痫痉
可作虎魄神物鸡白蠹能肥脂生平泽

He would probably have understood the phrase 血闭 as "blood blockage" if it was read one syllable at a time "blood" + "block".  But it seems that in that part of f105v.32 there is nothing remotely similar to anything in the part where  止血 = "stop bleeding" would be.  However, the meaning of 血闭 = "blood blockage"in medical context is "amenorrhea", absence of menstruation.  So maybe the Dictator read 血闭 as another phrase in the local language that had that specific meaning and did not contain the syllable for "blood". 

The brown parts 鬼东门上者尤良, 神物, and 鸡白蠹能肥脂 are non-medical comments that apparently were omitted from f105v.32.  The Author probably would have understood enough of the first sentence, "those [roosters? heads?] hung over the East gate are particularly potent [at killing ghosts]" to see that it was pointless to copy it.  Ditto for 神物 = "[amber is] a divine substance".  And presumably the Dictator himself would have told him that he coud not make sense of the last part 鸡白蠹能肥脂 = "chicken white grub can fatten fat".  

And you say some fields were quite complicated to understand, but that the VMS author understood enough to both recognise the beginning/end of such sections AND that he knew enough about the content to make a judgement call on whether to include it?   This fundamentally means that someone had to have taught him the relevant characters

Again, that objection would apply to some alternative scenario where the Author somehow worked on the hanzi.  In my preferred version of the Dictation Scenario, the Author probably did not know any characters at all.

The fact that some of the medicinal traditions were foreign to him seems to me to not be a good reason to leave those things out. I thought the entire point was to record information about this newly discovered medicine from the east.

The information in those omitted fields is mostly theoretical and would be useless in practice.  Even less useful than Culpeper's assignment of herbs to planets.  The non-omitted parts are all potentially useful, since they say that product X is good for condition Y or has the benefit Z.  Even if the Author did not understand X, Y, or Z right away, he could ask local doctors later.  If X was a plant that was unknown in Europe, it could be obtained by trade, like cloves, pepper, and other spices already were.

A sensible dictator would surely just read a sentence in his mind and then slowly orate the correct information in his local language one word at a time, instead of slowly transliterating into an incorrect mess. That dictator would also be hearing himself incorrectly say "red male chicken, flavor sweet  slightly warm, main, woman person burst inside drip", and would surely say to the VMS author "hey, you know this makes no sense writing it this way, right? I can just tell you what it says"

Sure, a translation into understandable English would have to insert articles, prepositions, and copulas everywhere, and replace compounds of N syllables by phrases with M words all the time, and reverse the order of words, etc.

However, a meaningful translation into any other current Chinese language, and maybe even into non-Chinese languages like Vietnamese or Burmese, would be pretty much syllable-by-syllable (in spite of @rickforto's protests to the contrary).   

Chinese languages generally do not have articles and rarely if ever use prepositions and copulas.  Compounds are usually translated just syllable by syllable.   For instance, I asked the lalamos whether any Chinese language had a specific word for "rooster", and they said no, all of them would translate 丹雄鸡 as three syllables meaning "red", "male" and "chicken".  Ditto for 鸡子 = "chicken egg".  Do you know otherwise? 

Surely there will be exceptions (see the "amenorrhea" case above).  But the gap size matches strongly indicate that the mapping hanzi -> Voynichese tokens is roughly one-to-one, and the mapping hanzi -> EVA is fairly close to one-to-five. 
 

For all we know, the VMS author was the leading world expert on foreign medicine and wanted to know all of the weirdest stuff the most.

That is possible, but if the dictation happened in East Asia I think it is far more likely that he (like Marco Polo) was a merchant by profession, who happened to have a good enough education.  That would have been enough for him to recognize the value that the information in those Chinese books would have to European physicians. 

I would wager that if the tables were turned, and the matches were only good when including the full text, you would be here justifying exactly why he would want to copy it all.

No need to wager.  I concluded that those parts were systematically omitted because otherwise the matches of the 主 to daiin left them hanging out at both ends of the recipes.  

Honestly, the far more upfront way of doing this would be to drop the theories / justifications for the removal process entirely and simply say that the SPS matches a heavily altered and trimmed SBJ text. I would more readily accept "I have no idea why the SBJ would have been heavily altered, but the SPS matches it" than hypotheticals on what someone chose 600 years ago.

Yes, definitely.  

As I tried to explain in my last reply to @rickforto, the Dictation Scenario is not a part or a prerequisite of the SPS=SBJ claim, nor of the Chinese Origin theory.  It is only my answer to those who would otherwise say that it was just impossible for an European manuscript to be written in some East Asian language, or to be a transcription of a Chinese book. 

All the best, --stolfi