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The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
- The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
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RE: It is not Chinese
countingtls > 25-06-2025, 10:50 PM
(18-06-2025, 07:55 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here are the lines of the Starred Parags section (SPS; from page 105r to page 116r line 30) that I am currrently considering to be "titles":
<f105r.T1.9a>
This is very interesting, consider the formatting and fonts are key structure and features in denoting subsections and types of materials, often placed not in the front, but as footnote-like at the end of a list of entries. They might be intentional, instead of errors or transcription quirks. They are supposedly to be there, just poorly formatted from someone who saw a printed version. -
RE: It is not Chinese
countingtls > 25-06-2025, 11:47 PM
As someone who speaks not just one but several Chinese sub-groups (a dialect in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 閩/福建話 family, a dialect in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 客家話, and some Cantonese, and ofc, Mandarin), I can safely say that they are as far apart as any European language and mutually unintelligible to each other. However, the same texts can be spoken out loud in any of them without changing the written words. This convenience even extended to ancient Japanese, Korean, and surrounding regions influenced by Chinese culture. They can see the exact same texts and just pronounce them as they like locally. (and within the proper Chinese dynasty regions as well, the dialects are as varied in the past and maybe even more)
And for traders across Southeast Asia and South Asia, there were several language families in these sub-groups, usually the coastal variations were adapted by the locals as some kind of traders' languages, since traders and sailors would come from these coastal regions (Min languages were one of them and spread to South and SouthEast Asia, and still You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). One historical event brought the spread of knowledge and crucially medical practices and physicians to the whole South Asia coastal region, even as far as the Middle East, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (known in the Chinese sources as 鄭和下西洋). Started in 1405 till 1433, with 7 voyages total. And part of the fleets travelled as far as the Mamluk Sultanate (most believe started from the 5th voyage in 1416)
One of the key features that differs from other "discovery voyages" is the size of the fleet (60+ main vessels and countless small boats) and the number of people in the whole fleet (~25000 people or more). Also, crucially, they brought 180 "physicians"(醫士) and "medical officers"(醫官) who hold government positions and were more akin to "science officers" who record and collect materials/plants/animals along the voyages, which almost every main vessel would have at least one. They were not just doctors, but had missions to "spread" influence to locals, and heal them if need be. There are practices in the middle-east can trace their origins to this event.
The time frame is also crucial, where the Yuan Dynasty (the Mongols) were defeated not long ago (in the previous century), and the land trade was mostly blocked by the remnants of the Mongol Empire. And the transmission and translation switched from Mongolian, Persian, and Arabic to the Chinese coastal language families for the traders. And the Ming Dynasty was extremely xenophobic (mostly due to the Mongols), however, they also realized the need for translators to spread their influence in South Asia and even the Middle East. They recruited many translators and traders in the treasure fleets (通事), and they often employed multiple translators from various regions to lead the sub-fleets when they branched out to further and further locations (all the ways to East Africa).
There was no doubt that the medical practitioners and officers would carry medical books with them, and document what they saw (there were historical records of several of these "doctors" who came back and published their journals). It stands to reason that among so many traders who act as translators, who might only know a dialect of a Middle East or South Asia trader's languages would communicate via another translator/trader from Southeast Asia who knew the coastal languages in order to communicate with these doctors abroad. And the treasure fleets didn't "trade" in the normal commercial trading fashion, but more acted like a tributary system. They would send out a sub-fleet to a local government by "gifting" them goods like porcelain, and in return ask for "tributes" of local goods (we know from records that there were many animal tributes, even as far as East Africa). However, since there are many middlemen, it is likely that these middlemen who act as translators as well, often profit from these tributes and pretend they are local officials from these far-away regions.
One scenario would be some Venetian merchants who might have Middle Eastern roots who trade with the Mamluk, realize there is profit to be made if they can produce a translation between the Royal courts in the Middle East or even European courts, and didn't care much about the accuracy, but the format (maybe just askin one of the secondary translator who aren't even native speaker of the Chinese coastal language families to help prounce words for the transcriptions, and the process might have happened not in regions around China, but on a vessel or in the extended guard posts, trading posts established for the sub-fleets in the early 1400s). Or they might have tried to fake a "European version" of a similar format and structure and want to use it as a tribute to gain favor (since they only saw the format, and assume medical books would need to look alike to be "accepted"). And the window is pretty short, since the treasure fleet suddenly stopped in 1433, and maybe one that was in production but never made it back to the main fleet for the last round (or assumed there would be an 8th voyage, but never came). -
RE: It is not Chinese
countingtls > 26-06-2025, 01:05 AM
(13-06-2025, 09:29 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are small oddities, perfectly explainable as mistakes, spelling variants, abbreviations, etc. and then there are massive inconsistencies, much less explainable: the big differences between Currier "languages" and all the many "dialects" on a smaller scale.
One of the interesting "quirks" of a BenCao book in the time period around the 12th to 14th century printed versions is that they were effectively like a "dictionary" of references across multiple eras, and mainly the Old Chinese with classical Chinese writing in the core, and Middle Chinese about to transition to Early Mandarin added to expand the work. The core entries would come from the oldest sources of classical Chinese and Old Chinese (before the 6th century, and the first massive rewrite/compile), while the later references attached to them by authors mainly in the 10th to 12th centuries (the second massive rewrite/recompile). They are related, but very different in their grammar and structure. And they would include dialects and aliases across many different regions in the later expansion (the earlier scripts would be more "pure" and highly "stylised" since they've been copied more times and streamlined across many editions). It is a feature of a long-lasting tradition of recording and expanding/reinterpreting the same work across hundreds of years.
Then imagine someone who just know how to pronounce the words in just one dialect in a remotely related language family and record/translate them, and not able to properly distinguish tones as an intermediary translator/trader. -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
rikforto > 10-11-2025, 03:33 PM
[Moderator note: this post and the following to #140 have been brought over from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]
(10-11-2025, 07:19 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At that time, in china a kind of official language was just beginning to develop, and otherwise there were hundreds of dialects and languages in the region.
At that point, Classical Chinese was coming up on its 2nd millennium as either the de facto or de jure language of government---albeit not always alone. But certainly during the Ming era that would have been the scribal language of any literate person informing the Voynich scribe, including from most neighboring kingdoms. That's also late enough that we have a good picture of the pronunciation of most of the Chinese languages, certainly good enough that if we got a foothold on Voynichnese we could compare them.
Now, of course, there's no reason to assume that the informant would be literate (in fact, it makes more sense under the hypothesis to assume not) or speaking any of the Chinese varieties, but any kind of Chinese in the 1400s would be approachable with the right tools. -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
Jorge_Stolfi > 10-11-2025, 05:38 PM
(10-11-2025, 07:19 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interesting theory – but that would make translation nearly impossible. At that time, in china a kind of official language was just beginning to develop, and otherwise there were hundreds of dialects and languages in the region.
Indeed it would be very difficult. It would require some knowledge of the old form of the language. But if the books are indeed the most important books on each subject, we can hope to identify them, and then they would be a "Rosetta Stone" for Voynichese.
Quote:Foreign (unknown) languages have always been a good form of encryption
Indeed. No encryption method is as hard to crack as a language that you don't know and is not close to any language that you do know.
See Etruscan, for example. Until a few year ago, scholars had identified the words for numbers 1 to 10, but for two of them -- 4 and 6 --- they could not figure out which was which. They recently cracked that puzzle thanks to a pair of Etruscan dice that had the numbers spelled out, instead or marked with dots, and a statistical analysis of the number arrangements on a couple hundred dice from the time -- which showed that the vast majority already used the current rule that opposite faces add to 7.
Quote:are there any sources or threads
All I knew (not much) when I took a long break was eventually posted to the Voynich mailing list. The finding that got me into this theory was the word You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of lexemes (word types). At first I thought that it was evidence for a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I think that is unlikely for several reasons.
Quote:If I am convinced, I can finally give up my laborious work...
And that was indeed the main reason why I lost interest in the VMS around 2004 or so. I did not have the knowledge needed to "crack the code", and had no hope of acquiring it.
While I still believe in that theory, I am back because I think that I can still have some things I can contribute, even if that theory is correct. And there are a thing or two that I can try that could prove it -- even without actually "deciphering" it.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
JoJo_Jost > 10-11-2025, 06:04 PM
(10-11-2025, 03:33 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At that point, Classical Chinese was coming up on its 2nd millennium as either the de facto or de jure language of government---albeit not always alone. But certainly during the Ming era that would have been the scribal language of any literate person informing the Voynich scribe, including from most neighboring kingdoms. That's also late enough that we have a good picture of the pronunciation of most of the Chinese languages, certainly good enough that if we got a foothold on Voynichnese we could compare them.
I am anything but an expert on China, but I did some more research.
During the Ming dynasty from 1368 onwards and the Qing dynasty, the term guanhua (官話, guānhuà – “language of the officials, Mandarin”) appeared to refer to the general standard language. However, it initially established itself in the north and was certainly not yet ‘nationwide’ 60 years later. That is what I meant when I said that it ‘began’ to spread.
At that time, however, there were hundreds of other language variants in China, and we are talking about spoken languages, not written -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
Jorge_Stolfi > 10-11-2025, 07:18 PM
(10-11-2025, 06:04 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.and we are talking about spoken languages, not written
Well, in my theory the text was taken from books. The Author got someone to read each book aloud while he wrote down the sounds in his ad-hoc phonetic alphabet.
In that scenario, the Dictator would have to be literate. Thus he probably read the book in Mandarin, rather than in the local dialect. (While the "dialects" today have very similar syntax to Mandarin, the differences -- especially at the time -- may have made reading in the local dialect more difficult.)
If the "old Chinese dialect" possibility is not bad enough, it is possible that the Dictator did not know the Chinese characters for all those plants and diseases. Rather than stop an tell the Author "sorry, but here there is a character that I don't know", the Dictator may have made up a bogus reading on the spot, aware that the "gringo" would be unable to tell...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
quimqu > 11-11-2025, 08:34 AM
(10-11-2025, 07:18 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, in my theory the text was taken from books. The Author got someone to read each book aloud while he wrote down the sounds in his ad-hoc phonetic alphabet.
In that scenario, the Dictator would have to be literate. Thus he probably read the book in Mandarin, rather than in the local dialect. (While the "dialects" today have very similar syntax to Mandarin, the differences -- especially at the time -- may have made reading in the local dialect more difficult.)
If the "old Chinese dialect" possibility is not bad enough, it is possible that the Dictator did not know the Chinese characters for all those plants and diseases. Rather than stop an tell the Author "sorry, but here there is a character that I don't know", the Dictator may have made up a bogus reading on the spot, aware that the "gringo" would be unable to tell...
All the best, --stolfi
Just being curious: and how does your theroy explan the qokeedy qokeedy repetitions or the fact that just a bunch of "words" are most repeated throughout the MS (daiin, chol, etc)? Does Chinese behave like this? -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
Jorge_Stolfi > 11-11-2025, 10:14 AM
(11-11-2025, 08:34 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just being curious: and how does your theroy explan the qokeedy qokeedy repetitions or the fact that just a bunch of "words" are most repeated throughout the MS (daiin, chol, etc)? Does Chinese behave like this?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a text in Chinese (Mandarin pinyin) with no punctuation or hyphens, each parag formatted as a single line, with blanks before and after each word, and a line "=" between parags. It has ~59500 words. I count 248 non-overlapping occurrences of " X X " where X is a single word.
It is derived from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which has the original text with punctuation and the Chinese characters in braces (unfortunately not in Unicode but in an older two-byte-per-character encoding).
I don't remember how common repeated words are in the VMS. Anyway, repeats may be even more common in other monosyllabic languages. Also this text is transcripts from the Voice of America broadcasts; if the writers were native English speakers, they may have avoided repeats, since they are considered defects in English.
And also statistics like this one depend a lot on the text, maybe more than the language. A herbal (say) may make frequent use of a term or syntax that happens to be a duplicated word. Like English "fifty-fifty" or "had had". (The last one occurs 4 times in War of the Worlds). Or Italian "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Opinions on: line as a functional unit
rikforto > 11-11-2025, 04:42 PM
Jorge, you might be interested to know that the situation for written Chinese in 1400 would point to a single underlying language, namely literary Chinese. There were a few vernacular writings at this time, and a vernacular influence on the literary standard, but prior to 1900 most writers were trying to emulate the Classical model.
The supposition of a dictator throws a wrench into that, as literary Chinese could be read with any overlying correspondence to contemporary or historical pronunciations. But, rather like how there is an aYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it would not be, say, Mandarin just because the dictator used a Mandarin reading. But the flip side is that there are straightforward (if not always neat) correspondences between how characters are read in different times and places, and it may be possible to get a foothold since you have a theory of a syllable, and just about every variety has a 1-to-1 correspondence between syllables and characters.
Obviously, it might be something other than a Sinitic language, but the longer I've looked at your statistical argument the more I've thought someone should be trying to establish a character-to-Voynichese correspondence.