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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
JoJo_Jost > 21-09-2026, 06:25 AM
@ Stolfi
No, it’s not as simple as you’re trying to make it out to be.
Your own table doesn’t refute my argument; it continues to show exactly the connection: Even outside your SHDY group, tokens containing “sh” are followed by “qo” in about 29% of cases, compared to about 15% for tokens without “sh.” That’s a factor of 2. At the same time, it shows that the rest of the token structure is relevant. The two aren’t contradictory.
My actual point is the difference between your two comparisons: Your Pinyin table examines the last letter of one syllable and the first of the next—I’m aware of that effect, and we’ve discussed it before. My finding, on the other hand, concerns a character further back in the token and the beginning of the following token. Your Pinyin table therefore does not answer this question either.
My analysis based on token frequency has already shown that the effect isn’t limited to just a few high-frequency forms. The fact that it also occurs in rare forms doesn’t directly rule out a linguistic explanation, but it does require an explanation that goes beyond individual high-frequency word pairs and which, as far as I’ve been able to verify (again, I don’t speak Chinese), would be atypical for Chinese.
Of course, such correlations can also arise from grammatical constructions. Only “Shedy” is among the high-frequency words in the VMS.
And by the way: If qo is supposed to mean “and,” you’ll also have to explain why, in over 80 percent of cases, the following glyphs begin with k or t. That doesn’t quite add up either.
And as I’ve already hinted at, this isn’t the only long-range effect that extends beyond the word boundary and a space.
Here, too, these differences persist even after removing the most frequent token pairs. So the repetition of a few identical phrases isn’t enough to explain this on its own.
However, the mere existence of statistical dependencies in Chinese does not explain these specific patterns. To do so, you’d have to demonstrate corresponding dependencies in a fixed transcription of a Chinese reference text—particularly between characters preceding a consistent ending and the beginning of the next token. Based on my research, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll find anything like that. But then again: I don’t speak Chinese. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 21-09-2026, 07:42 AM
(20-09-2026, 05:06 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is ridiculous. In every case, for every person, there is a 100% chance of a 3 facing up when the die is rolled because that is the reality of the situation.
But you say that only because I told you that Uri Geller was there and intended to force a '3'. And you believed that he could do it.
But what If I told you that Uri was a con artist who cheated all the way through the "scientific" parapsychology tests that he was put to, but now is quite senile and believes that he really has psychokinetic powers but actually can't move one hair of a bacterium?
Quote:If they were to test their probabilities by rolling the dice over and over, they would quickly be proved wrong, and would have to change their assumptions.
First: sure, if they had more information, the rational behavior would be to change their probabilities according to Bayes's formula.
Second: probability theory does not say that one can or should determine the probability of a future event from the outcomes of a series of "similar" experiments. That deduction is based on a non-trivial reasoning, and may be rational for some people but not for others, even when looking at the same experiments. It depends on each person's knowledge and prior probabilities.
Consider again the scenario of my previous post, with Uri sane and powerful. Let's say that Joe first tests the die by rolling 600 times, and sees that a '3' came out 113 times. Then he would set his probability of a '3' on the next throw (for the bet) to 1/6 or 113/600 (depending on his prior faith on the maker's precision).
But Uri would keep his probability at 99% -- because he just allowed the die to roll on its own during the test, but intended to force the '3' outcome in next throw.
The point here is that Joe's deduction of the probability of the next throw from the previous "113 out of 600" test was fundamentally flawed, because the next throw was not actually similar to the previous 600. But 1/6 was a rational choice for him, because he did not know that.
In fact, the reason why 1/6 is the usual and rational choice for the probability of getting '3' on a fair die is that every one is equally ignorant about the reality of the situation. No one (not even the person throwing it) knows the speed, position, and orientation of the die when it is released. And even if they somehow obtained that data before the throw, no one would be capable of computing the die's trajectory from that data, accounting for all the minute irregularities of the table and imperfections of the die, until it got to rest.
And that brings up two more points:
Third: your probabilities for the possible outcomes of some uncertain event will depend not only on the information that you have about that event, but also on your capacity to process that information.
Scientists often compute probabilities by assuming that variables have a Gaussian distribution, even when that cannot be true, because the math becomes manageable that way. For instance, in the C14 measurement of the VMS vellum, the technicians assumed that the actual ratio R of C14 to C12 atoms had a Gaussian distribution centered at the value that their instrument showed. However, according that assumption, there was a small but positive probability that R could be negative, or greater than 1; which are physical impossibilities.
Quick, without looking: what is the probability that the 100th digit of pi is '3'?
If you memorized pi with 100 digits, your probability of that should be either 0 or 1. But if you haven't, the rational choice for you would be 1/10 -- because you would be unable to compute the 100th digit just like that, and you have no reason to think that any digit is more or lesslikely than any other.
Fourth: it does not make sense to assign a probability other than 0 or 1 to the outcome of an event that already happened and whose outcome you know. Once a die, fair or not, has been thrown, and you saw that it stopped with '3' on top, your probability of that throw yielding '3' is 100% and that of any other digit is 0%.
What may make sense is to compute the probability that someone (or you) would have assigned to the outcomes of that throw before knowing what the actual outcome was.
Like: you tossed a coin 10 times and "heads" came up every time. The probability of that run is 100% -- once you know that that is what happened. But before you threw the coins, IF you had no reason to think that one side was more likely than the other, and IF you believed that each throw would start with different parameters, then you should have set your probability of 10 heads at 1/1024.
Quote:Unless you are going to start claiming that we are all living in literally different realities
I am Platonist -- I do believe that there is a single "real reality", but each of us can have only incomplete and often different knowledge of it.
The "incomplete" is why we must work with probabilities rather than with true-or-false logic; and the "different" is why each of us will often assign very different probabilities to uncertain events, even when confronted with the the same piece of evidence.
Quote:we must assume that everything being said has some underlying factual or logical basis that can be tested in some way
Unfortunately, at every moment we must make decisions before we can do those tests. When you get out of the bed in the morning, do you first check whether the floor is still there, and will support your weight?
Quote: Your underlying assumptions about the VMS are either right or wrong (or a mix) because they are assertions about the properties of reality itself. ... The VMS is something. There do exist hypothetical correct assumptions about its nature.
Sure, either the SPS is a transcription of the SBJ, or it is not. (It could be some SBJ recipes mixed with other material, but I hope you will agree that this third possibility is much less likely that either of the other two.)
Quote:So, if your underlying assumptions used to calculate your probabilities are wrong, your probabilities are likely correctly calculated, but wrong with regards to reality.
The probabilities that matter are those that follow from the assumption that the SPS is NOT the SBJ, but a completely unrelated text.
We can count how many EVA letters there are in the relevant SPS text (about 41'000 in the single-star parags) and how many times each string of EVA letters occurs (232 times for daiin and 272 times for kaiin). But, if the SPS is not the SBJ, the positions where each string occurs were determined by processes that we know nothing about (the contents of the text, the language, the orthography, etc.).
Thus, because of that ignorance, it is reasonable to assume that the probability of parag f105v.32 containing N occurrences of daiin and M occurrences of kaiin is the number given by the appropriate probability theory formula for a "random" text of 361 letters generated by a Poisson-like process that spews about 5.6 daiin and 6.6 kaiin every 1000 letters, on the average. That assumption also tells us the probability of that process generating seven daiin, in that parag, with specific distances between five of them.
And then we sould compute the probability of getting similar distance coincidences not only for the "red rooster" recipe but also for P other recipes and parag pairs with specific crib lists (like the "foxtail millet" and f107v.20 that I posted the other day).
Yes, I should write code to compute that probability with the proper combinatorial formula and string frequencies. It is possible, but not trivial. Meanwhile I must rely on crude approximations, like the "boxes with coins" model that I posted lat week. The numbers I get have convinced me that the probability of the coincidences being due to mere chance is very small. But I understand that your estimate can be different...
Quote:
(20-09-2026, 03:56 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Because I know that many people are already firmly convinced that the text is a heavily encrypted European language, or random gibberish, or Bavarian or Greek or whatever with a non-standard spelling.
If you are convinced that that is the reason people have an issue with your methodology here, please reconsider. This almost feels like its getting tribal. I'm sure many of us here are discussing this in good faith and with an open mind.
That is not "bad faith". It is just what Bayes's formula says. If you have become quite convinced that X is true, you should dismiss any evidence for Y as "mere chance", even if the probability of it occurring by mere chance is (say) 0.1%. You should require a lot of evidence before changing your belief -- much more evidence than would suffice to convince someone with no prior opinion.
I am quite convinced that our brain is not capable of parapsichological feats like psychokinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, etc. That conviction resulted from my knowledge of physics and of how the brain works. Thus, I dismiss offhand any report of such phenomena, even in supposedly "scientific" settings, as being due to fraud, bad protocols, faulty instruments, incorrect statistics, etc. Without even bothering to read the details. It would take a very strong confirmation of many cases by many reputable scientists to change that belief.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 21-09-2026, 08:01 AM
(20-09-2026, 09:47 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(20-09-2026, 08:24 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But recently someone tried to refute the SPS=SBJ claim by pointing out that the SBJ has more repeated words and phrases than the SPS. Ahem....
"Ahem" is not a counter-argument.
The "ahem" is merely underscoring the irony of people frst claiming that "the VMS has too many repeated words" but now saying that the SPS has "too few repeated words".
Quote:See posts #527 and #528 in this thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Yes, I saw those posts, and I am working on the reply.
Meanwhile, maybe you should check where in the SBJ those long repeated sequences are located, what they say, and why they are repeated.
And consider what 5% or 10% of token spelling variations would do to them.
Quote:Refuting your claims is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Just be sure to not step into the barrel when you do that.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Aga Tentakulus > 21-09-2026, 08:01 AM
This has nothing to do with imagination, but with many years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s exactly what’s needed.
If you understood even a little bit about it, you’d know that.
Take a close look and learn.
So You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an introduction. It’s also the first page of Quire 13. Turn the page; next comes the extension.
If you want to produce something on a larger scale, you have to grow it yourself. Only an idiot would go into a meadow or a wood to gather grapes or wheat for a glass of beer or wine. And certainly not if you want to supply a town. Later on, the book shows the next steps in the process. Exactly what these are remains unknown.
Now you have a connection from page 1 to Quire 13. Symbolised by a plough, just as there is a connection to recipes symbolised by a mortar.
Do you think they’re Chinese characters? Who’s letting their imagination run wild now? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 21-09-2026, 08:03 AM
(20-09-2026, 09:52 AM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Sorry, what do you mean?(20-09-2026, 09:49 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the sentence "Give two bucks to guard 1 and two to 2 to get in", there are four "to"s in a row. Should they be parsed as "... and 2 2 2 2 get in"?
Of course not. But if we evaluate it from a Chinese perspective? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 21-09-2026, 08:14 AM
(20-09-2026, 01:17 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(20-09-2026, 11:28 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But if the VMS Author got his Zodiac scheme from Alfonso, why did he think it was OK to split Aries and Taurus into two 15-thing parts?
The reason why they could be split without issue is likely the same reason why the author of astrolabium planum felt that he could split it into 30 individual squares. T... perhaps he wished to use the given space more cleanly, or thought it looked nice, or perhaps he drew the circles too small and decided to split them in 2.
So there is still no Western precedent for splitting the zodiac into chunks of 15 "things" rather than 30 "things" (or 12 "things" as in the Astrolabium).
On the other hand, the Chinese "Solar Terms" scheme splits the Zodiac into 24 equal parts. Which would be 15 degrees of arc each.
Agreed, that coincidence (24 parts instead of 12) is rather weak evidence. But it is not zero...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 21-09-2026, 08:56 AM
(21-09-2026, 08:01 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This has nothing to do with imagination, but with many years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s exactly what’s needed. If you understood even a little bit about it, you’d know that. Take a close look and learn.
With all due respect for your experience: no, sorry, I cannot see a mortar or pharma symbol in the top weirdo, nor a plough in the bottom one.
If we set the similarity threshold low enough to get those interpretations, then many other interpretations are possible, and even more likely. Your "plough" could be a flying bird (can you see the beak?), a fountain (of youth?), an open book on a table, a two scimitars raised above a parapet, an inkwell with two quills, ...
Again: The bottom shape cannot possibly be what the Scribe would produce if he intended to draw a plough. The top shape cannot possibly be what he would produce if he intended to draw a mortar and pestle, or a beaker with a caduceus.
Quote:So You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an introduction. It’s also the first page of Quire 13. Turn the page; next comes the extension. ... Later on, the book shows the next steps in the process. Exactly what these are remains unknown.
Well, I can agree that the meaning of the drawings on f76v-f78v and several other pages of that section is still unknown...
Quote:Do you think they’re Chinese characters? Who’s letting their imagination run wild now?
Taken in isolation, that claim would indeed be laughable. But considering that the statistics or the text and the structure of the words are consistent with an East Asian monosyllabic language, and not compatible with any European language or any simple encryption schema, ...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
eggyk > 21-09-2026, 09:10 AM
(21-09-2026, 07:42 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.First: ...
I understand what you are saying, but this feels disingenuous. This entire response effectively boils down to "people will believe different things when starting from different starting positions", which is true. However, it appears as if you are considering each of those starting positions as valid, which is where this breaks down. You can keep changing the hidden variables for the dice roll scenario, but every time the dice is rolled there is a hypothetical set of assumptions that would be correct. In the case of the VMS, these variables are not changing this way, and if/when they do occasionally change it rightly has a big effect on all assumptions.
But anyway, with any of these discussions we can only go so far in working out the factual basis upon which we begin. The best way to bring others along convincingly is to have us all understand -and broadly accept/agree with- your foundational assumptions. This is how any argument or discussion is truly won: an argument from first principles.
Now to be clear, I am not necessarily talking about mathematical first principles, but instead the core foundation for the discussion. What are these? If you want to go deep, I suppose:
"I think therefore I am: I exist"
"I think that reality exists, including other people and objects"
.... (let's skip ahead, or we'll be here forever)
"The VMS exists"
"Voynich Ninja is a forum platform where people can discuss the VMS"
....(skipping ahead to the relevant part now, let's assume everything above this point is agreed upon by everybody)
"The changes made to the original SBJ are valid"
"The matches found between the SPS and SBJ are valid and signficant"
"The chance that these matches would occur at random is X"
"Please insert any others here"
It is these points that I was adressing when talking about whether the stastical process was correct. If any are flawed, you mind could be reasonably changed in some way. If they are all correct, my mind would be reasonably changed.
(21-09-2026, 08:14 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So there is still no Western precedent for splitting the zodiac into chunks of 15 "things" rather than 30 "things" (or 12 "things" as in the Astrolabium).
On the other hand, the Chinese "Solar Terms" scheme splits the Zodiac into 24 equal parts. Which would be 15 degrees of arc each.
Agreed, that coincidence (24 parts instead of 12) is rather weak evidence. But it is not zero...
Well, astrolabium splits 1 thing into 30 seperately depicted single "things". As opposed to 1 thing split into 30 within a single diagram. Therefore it makes sense that the individual sections can be seperated without issue, which suggests splitting a circle in 2 wouldn't affect the content within.
And if the solar terms splits into 24 equal parts of 15, why are only two split into 15, and the rest into 30? We can go back and forth on this, but fundamentally neither tradition fits seamlessly with what we see in the VMS. Perhaps nothing does, or ever will. I don't think either of us can currently use it as evidence of being western, eastern, or anything else. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Aga Tentakulus > 21-09-2026, 09:37 AM
(21-09-2026, 08:56 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Taken in isolation, that claim would indeed be laughable. But considering that the statistics or the text and the structure of the words are consistent with an East Asian monosyllabic language, and not compatible with any European language or any simple encryption schema, ...
Perhaps it’s just because I was in China and was literally bombarded with Chinese characters, but none of them looked like the ones in the VM. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 21-09-2026, 10:18 AM
(20-09-2026, 10:23 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At one point we went around on this for awhile and the reason you are saying "things" is because you acknowledged that the interpretation of them as degrees was untenable in 1400.
I call them "things" because I do not know what those 30 labels+nymphs+stars represent. They could be Babylonian degrees of arc. They could be the 30 nymphs that preside each sign. They could be the 30 girls that the Author planned to sleep with in each Zodiac period as soon as his mom would let him get out on his own.
We already went through that issue and it would be pointless to resume that discussion. You can say that I still have no idea of whether the Chinese divided each of the 24 solar term intervals any further. If they did, I don'k know how many parts went into each interval. Thus I don't know what Chinese concept the 15 VMS nymphs would correspond to (but it could not have been those "Chinese degrees".)
But what the VMS nymphs represent is not important. The important point is that the earliest pages of the VMS Zodiac -- Aries and Taurus -- apparently assumed a division of the Ecliptic into 24 equal "sectors". Like the Chinese "solar terms", and unlike the common European scheme (a division of the year into 12 signs of slightly variable length in days)
Quote:
(20-09-2026, 06:19 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What else could he have done?
Nothing is very much an option here
I don't get your logic.
"Do nothing" was also very much an option for Shakespeare when he considered whether he should write Hamlet. It would have saved him a lot of hard work. Does it follow that it is unlikely that he wrote it? Or that it is unlikely that Hamlet ever got written?
The SPS was written. It strongly resembles a phonetic transcription of the SBJ.
Quote:[The Author gave up] has an immense amount of explanatory power for why you cannot get a consistent correspondence between the two texts!
Except that I do get lots of correspondences -- which I would not get if the SPS was not a transcription of the SBJ.
Quote:There is a distinction to be had here between the linguistic difficulties you've been leaning on, that the hypothetical Author could not distinguish between words in spoken Chinese, and the kind of cultural reception these examples seem to reference, such as not knowing the exact context of hanging a rooster head on a gate. Your exposition might be providing clarity that is not in the text, but it seems like the text is understood from the way you are talking about it.
I don't get your point here. But the measurements strongly indicate that the Author did omit all the "flavor", "provenance", and "another name" fields from all entries, and the "amber is divine" and "hung chicken heads" and "chicken white grubs" comments from the "red rooster" recipe. It would be silly for him to include those parts in his transcription; don't you agree?