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• It is not Chinese

  dashstofsk > 3 hours ago

  A number of people have suggested that the VMS might be in some Chinese language.
  
  I think it is unlikely that this is so, but I am still curious to know what people might think.
  
  The manuscript was written by at least three people, possibly five. And who were they writing for? For themselves, or for other Chinese? Could there really have been that many of them in the whole of Europe, in the time of the manuscript, when trade routes were not that well established, to justify writing in that language? But also why invent a new alphabet when they could have just written in the Chinese script which hardly any European would have been able to read?
  
  There is also a problem with any language that uses tones for meaning, as highlighted nicely in
  
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• RE: It is not Chinese

  Koen G > 3 hours ago

  Even if it were a tonal language with some tonal differences ignored, Voynichese entropy would still be too low. And a whole range of other, more fundamental problems. How can we start assigning a language when glyph parsing remains a challenge and LAAFU/PAAFU effects remain unresolved?

• RE: It is not Chinese

  ReneZ > 2 hours ago

  (3 hours ago)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A number of people have suggested that the VMS might be in some Chinese language.

  
  This goes way back. First Jacques Guy and later Jorge Stolfi. I am not too much aware of any others.
  
  

  (3 hours ago)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The manuscript was written by at least three people, possibly five.

  
  We have to be careful here. There may have been five scribes, but these may just have been copyists, or people following a common set of rules. This is probably not an argument that can be used for or against this.
  
  

  (3 hours ago)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is also a problem with any language that uses tones for meaning,

  
  There is no problem with languages that use tones for meaning. I use this every day.
  
  The main issue with the 'Chinese' theory is indeed the lack of exposure of these languages to central Europe of the early 15th century.
  
  An issue is also that an untrained ear would very unlikely be able to record any spoken tonal language properly. (As an interesting consequence of that, meaning would be lost, which might explain several issues with the Voynich MS text. anyway...)
  
  

  (3 hours ago)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Even if it were a tonal language with some tonal differences ignored, Voynichese entropy would still be too low.

  
  As a side not to: "Even if....",  note that while Chinese does not show the tones in their writing, other languages do or at least partially (e.g. Thai and Vietnamese). This may be a modern thing though. 
  
  Low entropy can be achieved with targeted rules, and especially with tones, which could be written at the end of each word. This would result in a small set (say 4 or 5) of characters that can end words.
  And that is exactly what we are seeing.
  
  Here are some nice examplesof  correspondences between frequent Voynich and frequent Chinese words showing this:
  
  daiin  = da3  = ta (high tone) which means he, she or it. A perfect word to be most frequent.
  chol    = cho4  = shi (falling tone)  which means to be. Verbs unchanged in all tenses. Also a great word
  chor   = cho2 = shi (rising tone) many meanings, e.g. 'period of time' 
  
  Now I do not believe at all that this is correct, but it is still remarkable.
  And indeed, this cannot be kept up very long with other voynich words.
  
  So: statistically this is super interesting. Historically it is very challenging.

• RE: It is not Chinese

  Koen G > 1 hour ago

  Interesting indeed. I hadn't yet considered that the recording of tones might result in lower entropy. Still shaky though: I strongly suspect that any real experiment run along these lines would hit a brick wall sooner rather than later.
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