• Options
• Login
• Desktop Style

The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

• Index

  • The Voynich Ninja
  • Voynich Research
  • Theories & Solutions
  • The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
• The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Aga Tentakulus > 6 hours ago

  What I don't understand is why he doesn't write the sounds of the Chinese language using the Latin alphabet. Most people wouldn't be able to understand that on its own. Why encrypt it as well?
  Or do you understand.......
  “Hei Zung, Keim Ling, or Ping Pong”

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 3 hours ago

  (6 hours ago)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I don't understand is why he doesn't write the sounds of the Chinese language using the Latin alphabet.

  
  Could be for the same reason that everybody everywhere who had to record lectures, speeches, interviews, and court statements did not use the Latin alphabet, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Namely, because Latin letters take too long to write.  
  
  Or perhaps because the language had many sounds that did not exist in his own language, and would be cumbersome to encode with digraphs.   Like writing "tsh" for for the single consonant that is written "q" in pinyin, or "ue" for pinyin "ü".  Or tones: no one had yet thought of using diacritics for that, and anyway lifting the pen to write a diacritic on every three out of four syllables would have been too slow.
  
  In fact, it is possible that he tried using Latin (or Arabic, or Hebrew, ...) letters at first, but halfway through the first page he realized that it would be way too slow, and concluded that he had to invent a shorthand for the purpose...
  
  

  Quote:Why encrypt it as well?

  
  It is not encrypted at all.  In fact, the whole point of writing it phonetically was to let himself and others read it without having to learn the ~500 Chinese characters that are used in that text.  Otherwise, he could just have bought a book. (Books were much cheaper than manuscripts in Europe, since they were printed on paper with one carved wood plate per page.  Matteo Ricci, writing to Rome in the late 1500, said that he was impressed by how quickly and precisely an artisan could carve one of those plates, after gluing onto it a sheet of paper with the handwritten text.)
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > 1 hour ago

  We don't need to make a close read of the content or small differences, fortunately. I doubt your hypothetical reader had this exact edition, and the digitization errors were small enough I didn't systematically check if they were errors or simplified characters. No, the problem is this:
  

  (Today, 12:33 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.After mapping both texts to simplified characters, and comparing the hanzi by hand, I found that practically every character of my version (bottom 5 lines) was present in the ZLB version (assumed to be the top 7 lines), in the same order, intercalated with lots of other material.  After deleting the latter...

  Emphasis mine, because you are deleting words attributed Shennong. I have already removed the marked interpolations. There is no basis for recovering the text you are recovering from the Zhenglei Bencao alone. If the Reader were using it, and chose to only read the Shennong part of the Rooster entry, he would have no basis to make the edits you are.
  
  The reason why the Ming reconstructions were so bad was because available texts had assimilated a huge amount of interpolations into the text it was identifying with Shennong's original. The implication of the quote above about the Bencao Chengya Banjie is that Ming scholars couldn't even recover which ~365 materials were in the original, let alone the lean text you're using. Reading off "the characters marked in red" (in this case, the larger text) gets you the huge text you then had to make further edits to to bring it into alignment with the 21st century understanding of the underlying SBJ. That work would not be done to a high quality until 1799, and that's the version you are working from. Like I said at the outset, this has a strange status as a "lost" text because the evidence for a credible reconstruction never stopped circulating---this is not a text that was recovered because of a chance find---but it took 300 years from the first try to get a high quality version.
  
  So, again, I ask: Do you have a period basis for using a much later reconstruction?
• Next Oldest Next Newest