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The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
- The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
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RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Oscroft > 14-07-2026, 10:57 AM
(14-07-2026, 10:11 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why did the Author invent a new script
Ignorant newcomer here, but how do we know it was a new invention by a single author? Couldn't it have been a known method of keeping writings secret among a group of academics (at a time when religious persecution might have made that very desirable)? How many manuscripts from those times have survived, 5% or fewer? Doesn't that mean we should be very careful with assumptions like these? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
rikforto > 14-07-2026, 11:09 AM
Also, I will say, as critical as I am of the Chinese theory, I find a made-to-purpose script to be one of the more plausible elements, though even here it turns out that Jorge and I come to that from entirely paths. Middle Chinese, which was by 1400 was an archaic language but bear with me, had 36 initial consonants and a complex rhyme system. The Latin alphabet is extremely poorly suited to the forms of Chinese that existed in the Middle Ages, and even today Mandarin, which has greatly simplified phonology, strains the Latin alphabet a bit. I think there is something to the point that the conjectured Author might have preferred an adapted Latin alphabet, and that we ought to see more of the Latin alphabet in the script, but all else equal, we would also predict it is quite different, especially if the Author was willing to make radical changes as he played around. The jump to simply creating new letterforms becomes much smaller---though, Jorge, not trivial---in that view.
Tantalizingly, both the consonants and rhymes were described natively by a sequence of phonetic components, and an informant would have been familiar with dictionaries based on those principles. A person familiar with alphabets might represent each of the initials and finals then as a system of digraphs and trigraphs. Unfortunately, when I played around with using Voynichese as a con-script for Middle Chinese and some of the successor varieties, I found I could not account for the variety of Voynichese words. This is not the end of that matter, and hence why I am far less critical of the conjecture that it is a Mainland Southeast Asian language than of the particular identification here, but I will say the alphabet did not immediately suggest itself as a custom-made alphabet for period Chinese varieties. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > 14-07-2026, 11:09 AM
(14-07-2026, 10:57 AM)Oscroft Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I can say that the Voynichese script is generally similar to the Latin script of the time, and if we want, we can find a similar glyph for any letter. For example, EVA s is how the letter e was sometimes written, EVA n is how the letter i was sometimes written, and EVA r is the rotunda r. This doesn't prove much, of course, but the ease of such a comparison suggests that Voynichese is far from unique in nature.(14-07-2026, 10:11 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why did the Author invent a new script
Ignorant newcomer here, but how do we know it was a new invention by a single author? Couldn't it have been a known method of keeping writings secret among a group of academics (at a time when religious persecution might have made that very desirable)? How many manuscripts from those times have survived, 5% or fewer? Doesn't that mean we should be very careful with assumptions like these? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Mauro > 14-07-2026, 12:57 PM
(14-07-2026, 10:11 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(14-07-2026, 01:07 AM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Not to mention it is naturally quicker and easier to write in a system you have learnt and used and practised your entire life.
That is a good argument ... against all the other theories.
Why did the Author invent a new script, instead of using Latin letters?
If the text was a known language in a simple substitution cipher, one could say that he invented a new alphabet to make the encryption safer. But it is not a simple substitution cipher; if it is cipher, it is one that put the NSA to shame. Then using Latin letters instead of that original script would have not made it any easier to crack.
......
In fact, the Chinese Origin Theory seems to be the only one that can offer a plausible explanation for why the book uses an original script, and why the script looks that way. Namely, for the same reason that people have invented new alphabets: to make it easier to write down a language whose sounds would not easily map to the alphabet they used themselves...
All the best, --stolfi
I will notice the Lewis & Clark example you presented is a case where what you say above did not happen: they did not invent any new script, they used the English alphabet, and even English phonetics, to approximate the sounds of Amerindian languages (which are very different from English ones).
For what my limited knowledge of the argument can say, original scripts are quite rare and those existing have not been created by foreigners, but by motherlanguage speakers who understood their own language very well (ie. Han-gul, Cherokee scripts). In all other cases I know where someone tried to transcribe a foreign language they used their own writing system to approximate the foreign phonemes, starting from ancient Egyptians at least. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > 14-07-2026, 01:44 PM
(14-07-2026, 01:07 AM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
To write EVA t with a pen, you need at least two strokes: a left line and a loop.(13-07-2026, 05:02 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In terms?
Compared to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. handwriting, Voynichese is faster and easier to write than Latin letters. Its letters require only two or three lines and strokes.
How? Could you elaborate on which latin letters take more than two or three strokes?
c, e, i, l, o, s, can all reasonably be written in 1 stroke
a, b, d, f, g, h, n, p, r, t, u, x, y can be written in 2 strokes.
k, m, q, w, z can be written in 3 or 4 strokes.
Note that other than 'm', most of the 3-4 stroke letters are relatively rarer (or potentially non existing) letters, too.
e, i, l, o, d, s can be reasonably written in 1 stroke.
a, ch, r, k, n, y, m can be written in 2.
p, f, q, t can be written in 3. (t can be 1 or 3 depending on how curved the loops are)
Not to mention it is naturally quicker and easier to write in a system you have learnt and used and practised your entire life.
To write EVA s, simply draw the pen twice on the paper. Once for the lower element, and once for the arc itself.
The shape of the letter b can also be written in a few strokes, but it will be a little more difficult.
In general, there isn't much of a difference, and I agree that Voynichese is simple in terms of letter shapes and writing speed. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 14-07-2026, 01:51 PM
(14-07-2026, 10:47 AM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(14-07-2026, 10:11 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.to make it easier to write down a language whose sounds would not easily map to the alphabet they used themselves...
Is it that difficult?
It is much easier to compare the phonetics of Chinese with regular Latin than with any other alphabet.
It can be assumed that the author was a perfectionist and strove to convey the phonetics of Chinese as accurately as possible, ignoring the similarities with Latin. But... this is again an assumption. In fact, this is the whole Chinese theory.
Not easier at all... Even Mandarin, which seems to be a "Chinese" with relatively simple phonetics, any mapping of the consonants to Latin letters would have been (and still is) awkward, requiring two or more letters per phoneme and rather unnatural assignments (like pinyin "q" for one of the "ts"-like consonants). Check the last 10 entries of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (play the sounds).
The vowels of Mandarin seem to be rather simple (only 5-6 of them), but then there are the tones. Pinyin uses diacritics to encode them, but, depending on the Author's origin, they may have been unnatural to him. And even a single dot counts as a separate pen stroke. Each of the 4 tones is not a pitch but a pitch pattern. In particular, pinyin uses a single diacritic to encode the falling-then-rising tone (three different pitch levels in the same syllable). Would the Author have though of that? He may instead have thought of encoding the pitch levels, which would use up at least 3 of the 26 letters. Moreover, the tone applies to the whole syllable, not to any specific letter.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an alternative system for encoding the Mandarin tones using only Latin letters with no diacritics. Check how complicated that is. (Taiwan still clings to it, like they cling to the "Traditional" characters; apparently mostly for political reasons.)
And things may be even worse for other languages, Chinese or otherwise. Cantonese has six tones, and what seems to be the most common phonetic spelling uses digit suffixes 1-6 rather than diacritics. Vietnamese now has 6 tones too, but in the 1400s it may have had 8, and some of them are distinguished by a glottal stop rather than pitch. It also has 12 vowels. The modern script uses diacritcs both to distinguish vowels and to indicate tones, so often there are two diacritics on the same letter.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Grove > 14-07-2026, 02:14 PM
Learning to read and write Chinese is simplified by strict stroke order that means every time you write a character, you write it the same way and memorize it along with muscle memory. I can’t think it would make sense to invent your own personal script unless you might be trying to obscure the fact that it’s Chinese.
Oddly, when I first started contributing to discussions in 1997, it was with my own tonal system based on i and e repetition and vowels determined by final strokes. I was clearly hoping for a natural language with an unknown script at that time. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > 14-07-2026, 02:22 PM
(14-07-2026, 01:51 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Check how complicated that is
These are attempts to reproduce Chinese phonetics exactly. For a medieval scholar who had no linguistic education, it would have been easier to find "similar" sounds, or create them using bigrams like au, ah, etc.
But even if the author was very meticulous, why would he need to create a writing system from scratch? He could have created it based on Latin, simply adding the missing letters to represent difficult sounds. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
rikforto > 14-07-2026, 02:42 PM
(14-07-2026, 01:51 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Taiwan still clings to it, like they cling to the "Traditional" characters; apparently mostly for political reasons.
The main political reason is that reform is hard, expensive, and unpopular and they don't have a Mao to put everyone who doesn't go along with it in a grave. But the practical reason is that it increases the number of radicals and exceptional characters because the simplified reform was incomplete. There is an unresolved debate if that actually hurts reading comprehension or if it speeds up learning, but it certianly is not conceptually "simplified".
Underdiscussed in these conversations is also that Simplified is hideous and off-balance and asking people to volunteer to learn to read again so that the script could look significantly worse has always been a non-starter outside of Mainland China. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 14-07-2026, 03:02 PM
(14-07-2026, 02:14 PM)Grove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Learning to read and write Chinese is simplified by strict stroke order that means every time you write a character, you write it the same way and memorize it along with muscle memory. I can’t think it would make sense to invent your own personal script unless you might be trying to obscure the fact that it’s Chinese.
But learning enough characters to qualify as "literate" (thousands) takes many years of hard study. Matteo Ricci and other Jesuits managed to do that in a relatively shorter time, because they viewed it as essential to their mission of converting the Emperor. But someone who ended up in East or Southeast Asia for other purposes (like a certain Venetian merchant who lived for years in Burma, buying gemstones for the European market) probably did not even try. Did Marco Polo or his uncles do it? I doubt it...
Without learning the meanings of the characters, copying them (or buying a printed copy of the book) would be pointless.
All the best, --stolfi