- Options
- Login
- Desktop Style
Options
The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
- The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
-
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Aga Tentakulus > 13-05-2026, 06:34 AM
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 > 13-05-2026, 09:19 AM
(13-05-2026, 06:34 AM)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 > 13-05-2026, 11:49 AM
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:
(13-05-2026, 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? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 13-05-2026, 01:56 PM
(13-05-2026, 11:49 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.you are deleting words attributed Shennong. I have already removed the marked interpolations.
According to Google AI, the text you posted as being the SBJ entry as quoted by Zhenghe / Zhenglei is actually a "Frankenstein" and "badly scraped" portion of some other encyclopedia; It specifically cites "Xinxiu Bencao (新修本草, 659 CE)—the famous Tang Dynasty Imperial Materia Medica—or its structural twin, Tao Hongjing’s Bencaojing Jizhu (本草經集注, 500 CE)".
ChatGPT adds that the Zhenghe / Zhenglei has multiple nested layers of quoted text, and that text you posted seems one of the higher layers, not the bottom-most one (the SBJ)
Of course both may be hallucinating. But can you please check again your source, to see whether you really stripped away all the later additions and commentary?
According to Google AI and CharPT, there is indeed a portion of that SBJ entry that is quoted in the ZHB/ZLB as part of the SBJ text but is missing from my version: it is a comment （東門上者尤良） after 头:［主］殺鬼. That whole sub-entry reads "head: kills demons (those from above the eastern gate are especially good)". ChatGPT says that by 1400 no one could make sense of that comment either. That discrepancy is not much of a problem for me because it seems that the VMS Author consistently omitted such comments, so I would leave it out anyway.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
rikforto > 13-05-2026, 03:12 PM
Yes, I'm quite sure. I'm having a good chuckle about Google AI characterizing the sources available to the Ming scribe as "badly scraped", which is at once deeply unfair to this textual tradition and the heart of the matter. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 13-05-2026, 08:28 PM
(13-05-2026, 03:12 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, I'm quite sure. I'm having a good chuckle about Google AI characterizing the sources available to the Ming scribe as "badly scraped", which is at once deeply unfair to this textual tradition and the heart of the matter.
Well, Google AI insists that you are wrong.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to the Zhenglei page at the Chinese Text Project that supposedly contains the Shennong bencao "Red Rooster" recipe. (Is that where you got your text?) The black text is supposed to "quoted" and the green text is "interpolated".
Indeed the black text of that page starting at parag 20 contains my copy of the Red Rooster recipe (black bolded parts below) but also some extraneus material (purple unbolded parts)
# block 20
Green: 禽上
Black: 丹雄雞味甘微溫微寒無毒主女人崩中漏下赤白沃補虛溫中止血久伤乏疮通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上
Green: 臣禹錫等...
However, Google AI insists that this digital Zhenglei file at the Chinese Text Project fails to record all the typographical distinctions visible in the printed book. Specifically it claims that the original non-interpolated Shennong Bencao was printed in reverse color (white letters on black). And, according to the Chinese Origin Theory, the Dictator was reading from a printed book -- not from an internet webpage.
Anyway, the fact that scholars were able to reconstruct the uninterpolated Shennong Bencaojing in the 1700s implies that in some extant books that original text was somehow marked out.
So, who is hallucinating -- Google AI, or you?
(You did not ask some lalamo to criticize my proposal, did you?)
All the best, regardless --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 13-05-2026, 11:00 PM
PS. I found that there are tiny buttons at the left of each parag that link to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the corresponding page. The text was primarily obtained by running OCR on that image.
On those images one can see text in two font sizes, one twice the size of the other. On the digital text file, the big font becomes black, and the small font is green.
But the images for that book are black and white scans. Not color scans of pages printed in black and white. Thus, if the big font text used two or more colors to distinguish the original SBJ from additions by previous editors, that information was lost...
So, that website is not even evidence that that particular printing of the Zenglei conflated the SBJ text with text from other sources. Much less evidence that all materia medicas circulating in 1300-1400 CE failed to properly mark the "pure" SBJ material.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
JoJo_Jost > 14-05-2026, 06:59 AM
Since I’m currently looking into word boundaries and the glyph stream, I asked myself how Chinese theory can be reconciled with the 7–8 rules that define about 90% of all spaces in VMS? Unfortunately, I don’t know enough Chinese to even begin to assess this. If it were written phonetically, would that mean the Chinese language implicitly follows these rules? One can certainly imagine that.
So what interests me is whether these rules support your theory. If they do, that would be significant and credible evidence for your theory, and I could finally turn my attention to things other than the Voynich
:
The rules (Feaster, slightly modified):
-
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
JoJo_Jost > 14-05-2026, 07:47 AM
Sorry, I posted this in the wrong thread instead of in my own. -> That's why I deleted it here. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
rikforto > 14-05-2026, 11:57 AM
(13-05-2026, 08:28 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So, who is hallucinating -- Google AI, or you?
This is both incredibly rude and extremely revealing projection. I assure you, only one of us is contaminating this conversation with "AI" garbage.
(You did not ask some lalamo to criticize my proposal, did you?)
Before we get into the weeds here, a quick gut check. Does multiple recensions in a single entry seem like a good sign for your claim that this was still widely agreed upon in wide circulation? Or does it seem to comport with the evidence I already showed that prior to these intense scholarly reconstructions that there was no stable SBJ tradition? You seem to have missed it, but I found a text much closer to the assumed age of the VMS that didn't make mention of chickens but claimed to have the entries of the SBJ. This is just not what would happen if there were a bunch of easily accessible texts making the same attributions to Shennong.
But sure, we can take a look at the other SBJ recension:
Quote:20. 丹雄雞味甘微溫微寒無毒主女人崩中漏下赤白沃補虛溫中止血久傷乏瘡通神殺毒辟不祥
21. 白雄雞肉味酸㣲溫主下氣療狂邪安五藏傷中消渴 烏雄雞肉㣲溫主補中止痛 膽㣲寒主療目不明肌瘡心主五邪
22. 血主踒折骨痛及痿痺肪主耳聾腸主遺溺小便數不禁肝及左翅毛主起隂冠血主乳難肘胵裹黃皮㣲寒主洩利小便利遺溺除熱止煩
23. 尿白微寒主 消渴 傷寒寒熱破石淋及轉筋利小便止遺溺滅瘢㾗
24. 黒雌雞主風寒濕痺五緩六急安胎血無毒主中惡腹痛及踒折骨痛乳難翮羽主下血閑
25. 黃雌雞味酸甘平主傷中消渇小便數不禁腸澼洩利補益五藏續絶傷療勞益氣肋骨主小兒羸瘦食不生肌雞子主除熱火瘡癎痙可作虎魄神物卵白㣲寒療目熱赤痛除心下伏熱止煩滿欬逆小兒下洩婦人産難胞衣不出□漬之一宿療黃疸破大煩熱卵中白皮主久欬結氣得麻黃紫菀和服之立也雞白肥脂生朝鮮平澤
I think I saw a couple of mis-scans float by, but we're not dealing with a situation where correcting a couple of radicals fixes this. This time I took the time to mark the SBJ reconstruction because I do care about some of the features here. You might notice you lose a whole 主, which is admittedly fewer than if you stop at the end of line 20, but that's not the biggest problem for me.
Bearing in mind that I've already shown a few other ways the transmission had broken down, the most interesting thing to me is that there are parts of the SBJ Rooster text clearly subordinated under new entries. Line 24 is about the uses of black hen, but in the SBJ reconstruction the red text is about red rooster. Rubricating the text like that works at crossed purpose with the newer layer, as it shows the broken transmission, and undermines the authority of the later text. Taken with all the other evidence there's an easy explanation---this recontextualization is the process by which the SBJ became a lost text.
Anyway, if you don't think this edition can't be relied on, for whatever reason, there's a simple solution. Just find the extremely common source that you said was being circulated in multiple languages throughout Asia in the 1400s. I couldn't find it, which is why I settled for the much later edition, but this isn't my theory. You are used, I think, to arguing the Chinese Theory as something to keep our minds open to. Sowing doubt is enough to do that. But you are now making affirmative claims about an extant textual tradition, and the burden of proof is higher. Where are the texts? Why are you using a reconstruction from 1799?