The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And even if bounded to the language of the text, Classical Chinese no one by 1400 could recognize most of the syllables there because phonetic Classical Chinese served no communicative purpose.

You are so hopelessly confused.

Classical Chinese is not a spoken language.  It is just a written language. More precisely, it is the set of the written languages of "classic" texts -- languages that, depending on where and when the texts were written, differ to a greater or lesser extent in their lexicon (hanzis, hanzi compounds, and their meanings) and grammar (how those lexemes can be combined, and the meaning of those combinations.

What you call "spoken Classical Chinese" seems to be the "modern standard Mandarin-based reading of Classical Chinese".  It is a modern convention of Mandarin-speaking scholars.  It is not how the authors of those texts would have read them aloud.  It is not how Middle Mandarin speaking scholars would have read them in 1400.  It is not how Cantonese, Vietnamese, Burmese, or Japanese scholars would read them, in any epoch. 

Again, because of homophone proliferation

Homophones are indeed a problem when transcribing a written text in any language (Chinese or not) into any script (phonetic or not) from dictation.  

However, it is a minor problem for the Dictation Scenario.  First, because they are rather rare.  How many of the hanzi in the Rooster recipe could have been confused with homophones by the Author, if they were read in (say) modern Mandarin?  (Please assume a Dictator with a functioning brain, who was somewhat aware of the Author's fluency in the local language.)

Second, potential homophones can usually be disambiguated by context.  The homophones "to", "too", and "two" are very common words in English, but they get hardly confused in spoken speech (or dictation) because each occurs in a largely distinct grammatical context.  Same for "write" and "right", "read" (past tense) and "red", etc.

The homophone problem is insignificant compared to the other difficulties that the Author faced, such as the ambiguous and unfamiliar grammar, the medical terms and jargon, the unknown or obscure remedies ("qucao herb", "hard limonite",  "flying squirrel" etc).  

But all those problems do not imply that the Dictation Scenario could not have happened.  It would be like arguing that Geber's alchemical texts could not possibly have ever been translated into Latin, because the alleged translators were not alchemists and would not have understood his alchemical terms or recognized the substances he mentioned.

words in Chinese cannot be recognized atomically on a syllable-by-syllable basis.

They can be recognized about just as easily (or not) as the Chinese words can be recognized in the hanzi text without punctuation.  If the local language were modern Mandarin, an Author moderately fluent in it would have recognized "jī zǐ" as the word for "egg" about just a easily as the Dictator recognized 鸡子.  

Maybe you are thinking of a mechanical reading with monotone intonation and speed?  Again, please assume a Dictator with a functioning brain...

And again, the character correspondence between the unnamed language and Classical Chinese, provided it even exists, would be based on etymology, not meaning.

That may be perhaps what you would do.   Why on Earth and Heavens would the Dictator do that?

Not for nothing, this is the Latin Mass problem in Italy, if Italian were full to the gills with homophones.

What?

When you keep bringing up that there is some way to voice the characters that results in a hearer understanding the syllables as a means to understand a Classical Chinese text, you are smuggling elements of the Dictation Scenario into your arguments for why the VMS text is the way it is, and hence SPS = SBJ.

Again, the SPS=SBJ claim states that there is a mapping from the hanzi of the SBJ (as quoted in the ZHB) to the voynichese of the SPS, that appears to be mostly one-to-one for words and one-to-five for EVA characters.  Modulo some spelling variations and systematic omissions of specific fields and omission of a few non-medical comments.  The evidence for it is mainly the positional matches of certain crib pairs.  The SPS=SBJ claim does not specify how the transcription was created or how the hanzi or the Voynichese should be pronounced.  The evidence does not depend on either.

Again, the Dictation Scenario is not part of either the COT or the SPS=SBJ claim.  It is just my answer to those who reject any proposal of a East Asian language or Chinese souce as being impossible, for alleged historical reasons of because the manuscript looks totally European.  

That scenario may well be wrong; maybe the VMS was created in a completely different way.  Maybe even by an Author who coud read the hanzi.  And maybe Voynichese is not a phonetic rendering of an Eash Asian language, but a codebook cipher, or monosyllabic Bavarian.  But I think that scenario is the most likely one, because, among other things, it would explain some statistical peculiarities of Voynichese, and the pattern of spelling variations that I see when matching SBJ recipes to SPS parags.