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It is not Chinese
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RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 14-06-2025, 08:59 AM
(13-06-2025, 09:20 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it looks extremely weird that the Author concentrated on recording the sounds of incomprehensible speech instead of trying to figure out the meaning by discussing it with the Reader and translating or at least annotating it on the go.
One of the weirdest things I did in my life was sitting for a couple of hours in a dusky library room in Prague, while outside the sun shone on countless touristic opportunities, copying by hand the biography of Jacobus Sinapius/Horcicki/Tepenecz from a hefty History of the Jesuits in Bohemia. It was in Latin, and even though I recognized most of the words, I could not make sense of the text, because I know nothing about Latin cases and verb inflections. My plan was to type my transcription, after I got back home, and post it to the VMS list, counting that someone else would translate it.
The situation was not quite the same as that of the VMs Author in the Chinese theory, because I knew the script and was copying the text, instead of taking dictation. But it must have been just as unfeasible for him to ask for a translation on the spot as it had been for me. And his plan would have been similar to mine: "after I get back home..."
Quote:The Reader was probably an educated person, being able to read in the XV century.
I don't know about other countries, but in China at the time every civil servant (mandarin) had to pass a hard examination, which of course required the ability to read and write. (The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, in the late 1500s, managed to befriend and convert a somewhat high-ranking mandarin in Macao, who helped him immensely in his quest to become a respectable Chinese literate.) The point here is that the ability to read may not have been as scarce as it was in Europe.
On the other hand, that was before the Portuguese opened up the sea route to Asia, and thus before the Christian missionaries got there. The Author most likely was not a missionary or scholar, but a merchant like Marco Polo, or of some trade-related profession, with only an utilitarian education. And the Reader may not have had time or disposition to explain the contents of those books to that curious but utterly ignorant gringo. Doing so would easily have taken 10 times longer than just reading the books aloud.
Quote: [There should be,] For example, a single word written in the original Oriental script, a sample of Oriental characters, a few numbers in the original number system. [...] I remember from a while ago, that the red weirdos are supposed to look like some Chinese characters, but personally I don't see a lot of similarity between the red weirdos and properly written 兀 or 几, if that's the proposed reading.
I believe that on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the Author tried to do precisely what you say he should do: provide a sample of the original script. So he too the book from the Reader, naturally turned it so that the binding was on the left, and copied the two large red characters which were written vertically next to the right edge, which he assumed (probably correctly) to be the title of that book.
He tried to copy the characters to his notes, but he focused on the fYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., namely the "serifs" and variable width of strokes. He paid less attention to the tilt and length of the strokes and how they touched or crossed. And of course the characters were actually upside-down. Later in Europe, the Scribe -- who had never seen actuall Chinese writing -- tried to copy the characters from the Author's draft.
So that is what I think those red weirdos are: copies of copies of upside-down Chinese characters, mangled almost but not quite beyond recognition. I have not seen any other explanation that is more likely than this.
However, it is hard to tell what were the originals. I have You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but not much confidence on them.
Quote:an unambiguously Oriental fruit
There may be several of those in the Pharma and Herbal sections. How can we say there aren't?
Quote:an unambiguously Oriental object, utensil
Those would appear on books about subjects like surgery or metalworking; but in the books that the Author chose -- about astronomy, astrology, medicine, herbs -- there should be no such things.
Quote:if the folios are supposed to be read upside down
That is not what I meant at all! Only the big red weirdos would be upside-down, because they are the only characters that the author copied and could not tell that they were upside-down. The Voynichese text is definitely to be read as we read it, and all the figures that had an obvious orientation are correctly oriented.
Quote: As far as I remember, there are quite a few repeated labels, including relatively long ones, and absolutely none of them make any obvious sense. If my greps are correct, these are the repeating labels of 7+ characters:
2x otcheody [...]
If we include 6 character labels, there are some that repeat 5 times. If each label meant the same thing each time it appeared, there would have been very plausible explanations by now. I don't know, maybe the labels are not words but references ("fig. 1").
I stand corrected. Still, it is remarkable that there are so few repetitions, and each occurs only twice. Hopefully someone has already investigated this question in more detail...
Quote:I took the first label in the list above and tried to find it in the transcription:
[code]
<f68r1.10,@Ls> otcheody
<f68r3.22,@Cc> <!09:30>otcheody.chokchy.okol.cheol.dar.cho.keol.dolaiin.okeol.oly
<f72v3.6,&Lz> <!00:30>otcheody
<f114v.31,+P0> olaiin.cheo.otcheody.lkchedy.okol.okaiin.otaiin.otal.qotar[/code]
It appears fairly close once in a circular inscription and once more in a completely different part of the manuscript.
More precisely, the first occurrence is as the label of a star. The second is in a circular text on another similar diagram on the same fold-out folio. The third occurrence is as the label of a nymph/star in the Zodiac page for "Leo". So these three are consistent with otcheody being the name of a star.
The last occurrence is in the "starred parags" section. We do not know whether it is inappropriate, or a coincidence, or another reference to that star.
IIRC this case is typical of most labels: their occurrences are consistent with them being names of the things next to them in the figures. The exceptions may be non-specific labels, such as numbers or qualifiers ("main", "big", "upper", "hot", ...)
Quote:As far as I know, there have been a few language agnostic manual and computational attempts, trying to ascribe meaning to various sequences of characters based on context. Some of them looked a bit naïve, some more sophisticated. I didn't study them in depth, but I know that so far they failed to produce anything convincing for the public.
I can't imagine how a "language agnostic" decipherment attempt could produce more than a few isolated hints about the contents of the VMs. For instance, from the above otcheody example we may guess that the labels in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. diagrams and in the Zodiac pages are indeed the names of specific astronomical stars. But what can we get beyond that?
Many Arabic star names were usually words from the language, like Algol = Ras Al-Gul "The Head of the Demon", Ad-dabaran = "The Follower" (of the Pleiades), Etanin = At-tinnin = "The Serpent", etc. If that is the case also in the VMs, then any occurrence of a star label in the text (such as the otcheody in f114v) may or may not be a reference to the star. -
RE: It is not Chinese
ReneZ > 14-06-2025, 09:21 AM
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the weirdest things I did in my life was sitting for a couple of hours in a dusky library room in Prague, while outside the sun shone on countless touristic opportunities, copying by hand the biography of Jacobus Sinapius/Horcicki/Tepenecz from a hefty History of the Jesuits in Bohemia.
The touristic opportunities were not completely missed. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 14-06-2025, 10:08 AM
(12-06-2025, 06:17 AM)Yavernoxia Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(11-06-2025, 11:17 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Whereas no one seem to care about Starred Parags section -- which I suspect will turn out o be the true Rosetta Stone. Because I think I know which "Chinese" book it was copied from...
And which book would that be?
The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (SBJ).
My reasons for this guess are
- If the hypothetical Author asked a local scholar "which is the most important medical text you have here", the answer would very likely be the SBJ.
(The author Shénnóng is believed to be mythical, but in spite of this handicap he made more world-changing inventions than a Soviet scientist, such as the plow and tea. He studied the health effects of hundreds of plants by trying them on himself. As a side effect of these tests, his belly became transparent, so he could see the effect of the drugs on various organs visually and in real time. How could anyone possibly question or belittle his authority in the matter?)
- Quire 20 of the VMS, which contains the Starred Parags section, has 323 entries; but the central bifolio is missing, so originally there may have been anywhere between 323 and ~400 entries. The original SBJ had 365 entries.
(The SBJ entries were divided into 120 harmless drugs -- "dietary supplements", 120 remedies, and 125 poisons. That shows how Nature is biased against us. But don't worry, one of Shénnóng's great discoveries was that tea is a universal antidote to all poisons. But do worry, because some of the poisons are so strong that the tea must be taken immediately after ingesting the drug in order to have any effect. Which was unfortunately the last of Shénnóng's discoveries.)
- IIUC, each entry of the Chinese SBJ is a single parag, typically with a couple dozen Chinese characters. Each entry in the Starred Parags section of the VMS is a single parag, typically with a couple dozen words.
(If English translations are to be trusted, this is what the SBJ says about the cinnabar: "Dan Sha (Cinnabar) is sweet and slightly cold. It treats hundreds of diseases of the five viscera and the body. It nurtures the essence spirit, quiets the ethereal and corporeal souls, boosts the qi, brightens the eyes, and kills spirit demons and evil malign ghosts. Protracted taking may enable one to communicate with the spirit light and prevent senility. It is capable of transforming into mercury." And indeed, protracted taking of cinnabar -- a toxic red mercury sulfide mineral, possibly the red pigment of f67r2 -- would surely and quickly terminate one's senility and take one to communicate personally with the heavenly spirits.)
Back in 2004 I started writing a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Alas, like most of my notes, it is unfinished, with broken links, etc.
But the bad news is that the SBJ was popular in the whole sphere of Chinese cultural influence, even in places like Japan which had never been ruled by the Chinese; and thus it must have been translated into dozens of languages. And even in China, while there was only one written version, it would be read in totally different way in each province. So, even if we conclude that the Starred Parags section is indeed the SBJ, we would still have the problem of figuring out which language it its. Which, again, surely changed a lot in these 600 years... - If the hypothetical Author asked a local scholar "which is the most important medical text you have here", the answer would very likely be the SBJ.
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RE: It is not Chinese
oshfdk > 14-06-2025, 11:36 AM
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the weirdest things I did in my life was sitting for a couple of hours in a dusky library room in Prague, while outside the sun shone on countless touristic opportunities, copying by hand the biography of Jacobus Sinapius/Horcicki/Tepenecz from a hefty History of the Jesuits in Bohemia. It was in Latin, and even though I recognized most of the words, I could not make sense of the text, because I know nothing about Latin cases and verb inflections. My plan was to type my transcription, after I got back home, and post it to the VMS list, counting that someone else would translate it.
The situation was not quite the same as that of the VMs Author in the Chinese theory, because I knew the script and was copying the text, instead of taking dictation. But it must have been just as unfeasible for him to ask for a translation on the spot as it had been for me. And his plan would have been similar to mine: "after I get back home..."
I suppose you copied a few pages in a script you understood (so this was a perfect copy) of a language that you certainly could somehow translate later. Sounds like a reasonable thing to do.
What the Author did, copying hundreds of pages (even if the herbal part is a "hoax", it's still a hundred pages left?), in an imperfect manner (there is no way one could perfectly copy a barely known language by ear) with uncertain hope of having it translated later, without even attempting to replicate some of the original script or add some notes, to me sounds like a really bad plan. Maybe it's possible to invent the circumstances under which this would be the only option.
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:an unambiguously Oriental fruit
There may be several of those in the Pharma and Herbal sections. How can we say there aren't?
If there were, by the very definition of "unambiguously" we would have known by now A lot of botanists checked the MS, I'm not sure how many non-disputed plants are there, certainly not one that would be called "unambiguously Oriental/non-European", otherwise this would be big news.
My point was generally, why from a long list of Oriental imagery or symbolism that could have made it into the MS, there is not a single unambiguous example. If the goal of the Author was spreading/recording knowledge, I think one of the things she or he would be keen on doing was reproducing some of the images as accurately as possible.
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:if the folios are supposed to be read upside down
That is not what I meant at all! Only the big red weirdos would be upside-down, because they are the only characters that the author copied and could not tell that they were upside-down. The Voynichese text is definitely to be read as we read it, and all the figures that had an obvious orientation are correctly oriented.
How likely is it that The Author witnessed the Reader read hundreds of pages from a book, but failed to notice which way the book was normally held, nor got any hint from the images? And then put these symbols as if they were paragraph initials in the transcription for some reason? Again, it is possible, anything physically possible is possible, but overall this sounds like very strange reasoning on the part of the Author.
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Still, it is remarkable that there are so few repetitions, and each occurs only twice. Hopefully someone has already investigated this question in more detail...
There are lots of repetitions of shorter labels. These are the top 5-6 character labels:
8x otedy
8x otaly
5x otchdy
5x okeody
5x okary
5x okaly
4x otoly
4x oteedy
4x okody
4x okedy
(14-06-2025, 08:59 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.IIRC this case is typical of most labels: their occurrences are consistent with them being names of the things next to them in the figures. The exceptions may be non-specific labels, such as numbers or qualifiers ("main", "big", "upper", "hot", ...)
I still think if there was any consistency in the labels at all, we'd have a partially deciphered MS by now.
Quote:I can't imagine how a "language agnostic" decipherment attempt could produce more than a few isolated hints about the contents of the VMs. For instance, from the above otcheody example we may guess that the labels in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. diagrams and in the Zodiac pages are indeed the names of specific astronomical stars. But what can we get beyond that?
I'm not very familiar with these attempts wrt the Voynich MS. One example is the deciphering of the Rohonc codex. As far as I understand, the whole deciphering, which is considered plausible by many, was done by attempting to identify the meaning from the context. Maybe Rafal can comment on this one.
As far as I understand, one would start by identifying the most likely meaning of 5-6 repeating labels, then look for combinations of these words in the text of the MS and try identifying more vocabulary. And then proceed iteratively. To my knowledge there have been attempts like this for the Voynich MS, none of them looked very successful. -
RE: It is not Chinese
ReneZ > 14-06-2025, 11:59 AM
I am not so sure that, if this were a more-or-less straight rendition of some East-Asian language, it would have been solved by now. I do agree with Stolfi that essentially nobody is following this approach, and the possibilities are simply too many. -
RE: It is not Chinese
oshfdk > 14-06-2025, 12:45 PM
(14-06-2025, 11:59 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am not so sure that, if this were a more-or-less straight rendition of some East-Asian language, it would have been solved by now. I do agree with Stolfi that essentially nobody is following this approach, and the possibilities are simply too many.
I'm not sure how to estimate the global effort spent on the Voynich MS. The manuscript has been a hot topic for many years, and considering the research history, I suspect quite a few enthusiasts from academia prefer for it to be their quiet hobby project and not their officially known pastime. The scans and transliterations are freely available. I think we can say there are at least a few researchers from most countries that individually attempted to investigate the Voynich MS.
Now, a simple experiment. I think this: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the book that Prof. Stolfi referred to as a possible source of the Voynich MS. If it's not, this doesn't really affect my reasoning.
I used Google Translate to transcribe a few paragraphs into pinyin. Again, this is not the Classical Chinese and it's certainly not a perfect transcription, but my point is more general: this is some phonetic transcription of a scientific book in some eastern language. Then I found the longest substrings that repeat at least 3 times (this is not even the whole first page of the MS), they are below in the uppercase:
shàng YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi jūn zhǔ yǎng mìng yǐ yìng tiān wúdú duō fú jiǔ fú bù shāng rén yù qīng shēn yì qì bùlǎo yán nián zhě běn shàng jīng zhōngYÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi chén zhǔ yǎngxìng yǐ yìng rén wúdú yǒudú zhēnzhuó qí yí yù è bìng bǔ xū léi zhě běn zhōng jīng xiàYÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍwǔ zhǒng wèi zuǒ shǐ zhǔ zhì bìng yǐ yīng de duō dú bùkě jiǔ fú yù chú hánrè xiéqì pò jījù yù jí zhě běn xià jīng yào yǒu jūnchénzuǒshǐ yǐ xiāng xuān shè héhé zhě yí yòng yī jūn èr chén wǔ zuǒ yòu kè yī jūn sān chén jiǔ zuǒ shǐ yě yào yǒuyīnyáng pèihé zǐ mǔ xiōngdì gēnjīng huā shí cǎo shí gǔròu yǒu dānxíng ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG xū ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG shǐZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG wèi ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG è ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGfǎn ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGshā zhě fán cǐ qī qíng hé hé shì zhī dāng yòng xiāng xū xiāng shǐ liáng zhě wù yòng xiāng è xiāngfǎn zhě ruò yǒudú yí zhì kěyòng xiāng wèi xiāngshā zhě bù ěr wù héyòng yě yào yǒu suān xián gānkǔ xīn wǔwèi yòu yǒu hánrè wēn liáng sì qì jí yǒudú wúdú yīnqián bào qián cǎi zhì shí rì shēng shú shàng dì suǒ chū zhēn wěi chén xīn bìng gè yǒu fǎ yàoxìng
I already can see some plausible structures. For example:
YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi jūn zhǔ yǎng mìng
YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍ zhǒng wèi chén zhǔ yǎngxìng
YÀO YĪBǍI ÈRSHÍwǔ zhǒng wèi zuǒ shǐ zhǔ zhì bìng
You can see that wǔ was added inside some long repeated expression (I happen to remember that wǔ is the number 5, the repeated sequence is "there are one hundred and twenty", so it's talking about 120, 120 and 125 of something, EDIT: and I guess even without knowing the language after sampling yibai ershi and similar sequences from the texts, the numbers will be one of the easiest targets to crack).
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG xū
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG shǐ
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG wèi
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNG è
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGfǎn
ZHĚ YǑU XIĀNGshā
Looks like a collection of something. We don't know what, but we see the author is listing some things.
Real texts have a lot of structure regardless of the language. A lot of potential avenues.
There is absolutely nothing like this in the Voynich MS, as far as I know. -
RE: It is not Chinese
nablator > 14-06-2025, 02:30 PM
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RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 14-06-2025, 02:35 PM
(14-06-2025, 11:36 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What the Author did, copying hundreds of pages, in an imperfect manner, with uncertain hope of having it translated later, to me sounds like a really bad plan. Maybe it's possible to invent the circumstances under which this would be the only option.
I think that, in the scenario I described, it was indeed his only option. And people sometimes do make and carry out stupid plans.
Note again that anyone who spent a few years in the place would learn the spoken language to some extent. See Marco Polo, Gaspar da Gama, and all other merchants of that time who traveled to distant lands whose languages no one had heard in Europe. So he probably understood the text that the Reader was dictating more than I understand Latin, or spoken French. His knowledge was good enough that the felt confident in inventing his own script for the language -- but surely not enough to translate medical or astronomical treatises into Latin.
Quote:there is no way one could perfectly copy a barely known language by ear
Indeed. If the "Chinese" theory is correct in any form, that will be another big obstacle to decipherment: on top of the changes that the language suffered in the last 600 years, there will be an unknown amount of transcription errors -- when the Reader mistakenly read 候 as "shì" and the Author heard "chí" but wrote chaiin instead of chain.
Quote:without even attempting to replicate some of the original script
That would have been completely useless. It would not help him figure the
parts that he did not understand.
Quote:or adding some notes
Again, it would be impractical to write such notes while taking the dictation. He may have written some notes later, maybe even compiled a short dictionary -- but the notes surely would be very incomplete and messy, and would be written separately on paper.
Quote:even if the herbal part is a "hoax", it's still a hundred pages left?
I don't think that the text of the Herbal section is a hoax. My guess is that the Author took dictation of a book that became the Pharma section, for which he managed to copy the figures of plant parts. Then later he took dictation of another book that was similar to a herbal, but he did not have the time to copy all figures in full. Or maybe the original did not have any figures, only text. So back home, when "vellifying" the latter book, he had the Scribe make up the full plant figures -- by copying some bits from Pharma and maybe a few partial sketches by the Author, but inventing most of the rest.
Quote:If there were any [unambiguoulsy Chinese] fruits, by the very definition of "unambiguously" we would have known by now
A lot of botanists checked the MS, I'm not sure how many non-disputed plants are there, certainly not one that would be called "unambiguously Oriental/non-European", otherwise this would be big news.
But none that have been identified as "unambiguously non-Oriental" either.
Again, it seems to be a consensus that the drawings of the Herbal section are partly made up, and when looking at any plant we do not know which details, if any, are reasonably accurate. In my version of the "Chinese theory", even the non-fake details are copies of copies of drawings from some copy of a local book. Compare the drawings of known plants on Medieval herbals with their photos or professional drawings, to see how bad that situation is. And the Scribe obviously was not a botanical artist, and I bet that the Author was even less good at that. So it is no wonder that botanists have failed to identify any of the plants (except one or two, which unfortunately grow natively on all continents).
Quote:If the goal of the Author was spreading/recording knowledge, I think one of the things she or he would be keen on doing was reproducing some of the images as accurately as possible.
Again, I don't think that the Author's goal was to spread knowledge widely. At best, he may have hoped to eventually write a translation that he could sell or gift to a scholar back home. A plan which apparently was downgraded to making a nice vellum copy of the transcription itself, possibly with the encoding of sounds and tones explained verbally (how else?) to the recipient, and a small dictionary of the words he knew on a separate document.
Quote:How likely is it that The Author witnessed the Reader read hundreds of pages from a book, but failed to notice which way the book was normally held?
Many possibilities:- It may have been the first book that he transcribed, and he tried to copy the title before the dictation started; and he had not yet learned that Chinese books are bound on the right.
- The two were seated in such a way that the Author could not see how the Reader oriented the book.
- Or maybe he could see, but did not pay attention.
- Maybe he knew about the binding, but when he took the book he unconsciously turned it so that the binding was on the left, as he used to do with European books.
- Or maybe he turned it because the unconsciously assumed that the red big signs, being the title, should be at the top left of the page, rather than at bottom right.
Quote:, nor got any hint from the images
Presumably there were no images on that page, or he would have copied them.
Quote: And then [why] put these symbols as if they were paragraph initials in the transcription
- Maybe he was not sure whether those symbols were a single title or two parag capitals.
- Maybe in the draft he wrote them vertically on the left margin, and then wrote the text left-aligned on a single vertical line to the left of them, or in a separate sheet of paper. But the Scribe mistook them for ornate capitals, and formatted the text accordingly, with indentations.
All the best, --jorge - It may have been the first book that he transcribed, and he tried to copy the title before the dictation started; and he had not yet learned that Chinese books are bound on the right.
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RE: It is not Chinese
oshfdk > 14-06-2025, 02:44 PM
(14-06-2025, 02:30 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(14-06-2025, 12:45 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is absolutely nothing like this in the Voynich MS, as far as I know
There are many recurring word sequences:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There would be recurring sequences even in 240 pages of randomly generated data. What I'm saying is that in a natural text, no matter how it's transcribed, there would be easily recognizable grammatical structures - lists, common expressions, number sequences. "On the other hand", "either .. or", "if it's true... if it's not true". They should be blatantly obvious, once the text is transcribed. They exist in all languages I now, they certainly exist in Chinese.
It doesn't look like they can be easily found in the Voynich Manuscript. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 14-06-2025, 03:36 PM
(14-06-2025, 12:45 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think this: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the book that Prof. Stolfi referred to as a possible source of the Voynich MS.
Sort of, but
- the first page of that text is an introduction. The "recipes" proper start after the 《中卷》, and line 1 after that is the section title.
- This is not the "very original" SBJ, compiled around 200 CE, but an "expanded" version of it that was written around 1400 CE. Unfortunately it seems that the Chinese version of the former is lost, and what comes up on searches is usually the latter. Sources say that the former version had 365 remedies, while the "expanded" version has more, but the author himself says many are additions. But perhaps the "very original" version survives in other languages, and must have been around in the 1400s.
Quote:Then I found the longest substrings that repeat at least 3 times (this is not even the whole first page of the MS), they are below in the uppercase:
I found only one instance of "xiǎo'ér bǎi èrshí" (line 54 of the third section 《下卷》). The text you quoted seems to have been pasted several times (and lost the "x").
As for [font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, times, 'Heiti TC', PMingLiU, PMingLiu-ExtB, SimSun, SimSun-ExtB, HanaMinA, HanaMinB]"xiāng" I found several instances, but the contexts do not match the quote, and are all different. Is there a second page in that site?[/font] - the first page of that text is an introduction. The "recipes" proper start after the 《中卷》, and line 1 after that is the section title.