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The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

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  • The Voynich Ninja
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  • The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
• The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 1 hour ago

  (1 hour ago)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have not received a defintion of "meaning" that works for both positions

  (16-07-2026, 10:48 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The meaning of a symbol, a hanzi, a string of written letters, a diagram etc. is whatever the person who looks at it thinks it mean. The meaning of a spoken word, alarm, clap, whistle, etc is whatever the person who hears it thinks it mean.

  ---

  [quote"rikforto" pid='88037' dateline='1784342557']Formally, you never concluded if the words could be recovered or not. [/quote]
  

  (Yesterday, 11:24 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is no way to know what the languages spoken in 300 BCE sounded like.

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

  rikforto > 41 minutes ago

  I think it is both rude and harder to read to put things in red text, however:
  

  (1 hour ago)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Obviously I think these are in logical opposition or I would not have set them up as a contradiction you need to account for. That said, I am perfectly comfortable with the resolution being a synthesis position or some other third way. But if you want me to understand how these ideas coexist, you must write down an accounting of that coexistence. I quoted you because I read your posts, so writing the same thing slightly reworded with lots of bold emphasis will not resolve the contradiction I have identified. If I could do it on my own, I would not have asked about the seemingly contradictory posts, I would just put that resolution into the write-up.

  
  To the first pull quote, the other part of my question about how to reconcile it with the other quotes about consistent meaning between languages still stands. Are you still maintaining that? Critically, how?
  
  
  To the second pull quote, you told me that I can't infer that it's only about the sounds. If that is your entire conclusion, then surely I can represent you that way. 
  
  Again, if you would like to explain these positions, preferably in black and white, I am listening.

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 33 minutes ago

  (3 hours ago)J_Voy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Personally, I don't think that a Chinese theory is likely, my main reason for this is that Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contain the names of some of the months of the year in some sort of Romance language, along with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. containing text in a corrupted form of the Latin alphabet, either way, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is definitely written in an Indo-European language, not a Sino-Tibetan, or to be more specific, a Sinitic one.

  
  In the most general terms, my Chinese Origin theory (COT) says that the Voynichese text is a phonetic transcription of a monosyllabic natural language, not encrypted.  
  
  Under the COT, the only plausible possibilities for the language are East Asan and Southeast Asian languages, including the Chinese languages proper, Vietnamese, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Thai, Tibetan, Hmong, and other more obscure ones.  Thus whenever I write "China" or "Chinese" below, please understand "any one of those countries".
  
  In general, the words of those languages are not inflected for case, number, gender, tense, mood, etc.  They don't use articles and make relatively limited use of prepositions and other connectives, relying instead on word order and context to indicate the semantic roles (subject, object, verb, etc.) of the parts of a sentence.  Since each word is a single syllable, word length is sharply limited, and the words have a multiple-slot structure where each slot can be empty or filled with a limited subset of the phonemes.  All these features are seen in the Voynichese text, and are not seen in "European" languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Ethiopian, etc.
  
  The COT does not say that the Author (who composed the Voynichese text) and/or the Scribe (who copied it onto vellum)  were Chinese, or that the book was written and/or scribed in China.  It admits that the Scribe was European and was accustomed to write in some European language, and that the vellum was produced in Europe. 
  
  There are several possible scenarios for how the basic COT claim above could have become true.  The one which I think most likely is that the Author was a traveler who spent a few years in China, had one or more Chinese books dictated to him, and brought back those dictation notes to Europe; where he hired a local scribe to copy his notes to vellum and draw the illustrations.
  
  The COT does not say anything about non-Voynichese text -- the month names and the "marginalia".  The fact that those are written is (deformed) Latin letters and some (broken) European language does not contradict it. Besides, it seems likely that those text fragments, especially the marginalia, were added by later owners.
  
  All the best, --stolfi
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