The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Stolfi, if you don’t understand why I don’t consider the recipe a serious document, I’ll make a similar comparison.

Indeed I do not understand you example.  You took ONE song that has a word repeated five times i a row. Then you pointed to ONE set of VMS lines that has a bunch of similar words in a row.  And claim that this example is just like my evidence for the whole SPS being the whole SBJ, namely the occurrence of certain key words in corresponding positions of most recipes. 

Sorry, but no, it is nowhere near "the same thing".

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Theories that assume it is an encrypted European language cannot explain why one would encrypt the entire 200+ page book with a method so sophisticated that not even the NSA and Bletchley spooks could figure out anything about it. If the goal was to hide some "dangerous" stuff, why did the Author then add bizarre illustrations that would have attracted attention and suspicions? ("Those naked women must be witches celebrating a black sabbath. Off to the stake with him!")

If it’s encrypted, then there was something to encrypt.

In other words, "The theories that say it is encrypted offer no plausible explanation for why it was encrypted, nor why the book was created."

Why did the author have to show his encrypted book to someone?

If the book was not meant to be shown to others, why did the Author decided to have it copied onto vellum?  Why did he waste so much vellum with blank spaces in the herbal and with nymphs in the Zodiac?

The Chinese Theory explains all of those puzzling VMS features with no strain.

Really?

Yes, really.  

Please be specific.  Which part of the Chinese Origin theory you think is implausible?  

Which puzzling feature of the VMS you think cannot be explained within that theory?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

remain at a loss to give a fair, consistent explanation of the impetus for creating it. At a high level, I understand that it is supposed to be a workaround to writing the Chinese characters, and to record a dictation session or their phonetic value some other way. It is still not clear to me whether or not you think The Author understood the dictation, and you certainly think it is full of errors that you have supposed were due to the difficulties the author would have had telling words apart. Why create that kind of record?

What else could he have done?

All the people who have transcribed the VMS to digital files, starting with Friedman, never understood a single word of it.  So why did they do it?

The Zhenghe Bencao editors who copied the SBJ into their encylopedia already could not understand many parts of it. (Like those comments in the Rooster recipe about heads hung on the East gate, turning eggs into amber, and what were those "chicken white grubs".  And already could not identify several of the plants.)  

The archaeologists who copied cuneiform, hyeroglyphic, and many other ancient inscriptions generally did not undertand them either.  

The Medieval scholars who translated Arabic alchemy books into Latin surely could not understand much of them.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Chinese absolutely does not have this kind of long-distance dependency, neither in syntax nor in phonetics. Chinese is an isolating language. Each character stands alone. The strokes, structure, or pronunciation of one character have zero mechanical influence on the next character.

That is quite false even if one takes "character" to mean a Chinese hanzi character -- that is, a syllable. 

For example, in the Shennong Bencao the character 益 is often followed by 气, the character 久 is often followed by 服 or 食, the character 一 is almost always followed by 名, etc.  The second character after a 生 is often 谷, and the second character after 味 is usuallly one of five characters. 

If the Voynich manuscript were a simple phonetic transcription of Chinese (like Pinyin), we still would not see this 51% vs 28% dependency between the end of one word and the start of the next.

Those dependencies do exist in the SBJ, because of the dependencies between words above.

The following file shows the counts of triples [letter][space][letter] in a Mandarin pinyin version of the Shennong Bencao.  


  last-to-first.txt (Size: 6.43 KB / Downloads: 6)

You can see, for example, that a syllable that ends in "g" (from "ng") is most often followed by a syllable that starts with "s", about five times more often than one that starts with "x" (511 times against 130).  

Whereas a syllable that ends in "i" is most often followed by a syllable that starts with "x", about twice as often as one that starts with "s" (151 times against 67).

That brings up two important points: 

1. Never make any claim about statistics of a language of text without checking it first.  You will almost always be surprised.
   
2. Don't waste your time with character-based statistics in alphabetic languages like Latin, pinyin, or Voynichese.  They are usually more confusing that illuminating.  Look at word-based statistics instead.
   

The reason for point 2 is that the frequency of a character (or character pair etc) in a text is determined by its occurrence in the most frequently used words and phrases in that text, and these word statistics are are all mashed together.  

For example, in English the combination "th" is very common at the start of a word.  But that is because there are a handful of very common words like "the", "that", "this", and "them" that happen to start with "th".   So the claims that, in English,

• Words often start with th.
  
• A word that starts with th is often followed by a word that starts with i.
  

while they may be true (I should have checked!), they do not really say anything useful about the English language, and are in fact misleading.  Much more useful would be to say

• The most common word is the.
  
• The word this is often followed by the word is, while they is often followed by are.
  

Character and digraph frequencies (or entropies, correlations, etc) may be useful when you start studying a text in an unknown script; but after that one should look instead at words and word patterns.  For the VMS, the window when character-based statistics were appropriate ended some 80 years ago.

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

AI models often hallucinate when dealing with ancient Chinese texts because they don't truly understand the historical printing formats like "白底黑字" (black characters on a white background) and "黑底白字" (white characters on a black background).

Gemini does seem to have that information -- not from analyzing scanned images of the ZHB drectly, but from thousands of articles that discuss the contents of the SBJ and ZHB and the printing history of the latter, in extreme detail.  Its claims about what was printed white-on-black rather than black-on-white in ZHB copies printed before 1400 often coincide with the CTP file, so it does have that knowledge.  But it is often wrong (and contradicts itself) on certain phrases or individual diseases and fields. 

Don't rely on AI for the text structure. Instead of asking Gemini "which parts are 白底黑字", you should look for scanned images of the original book. The book you are looking for is likely the "重修政和经史证类备用本草" (the famous 晦明轩 edition of the ZHB).

That would solve the problem, but I suspect that it would take me even more time than battling with Gemini, and I will end up with more errors.  Keep in mind that I know only a few hanzi, and only the simplified versions.  

I already have one PDF file with scanned images of one volume (#5) of a ZHB print with the white-on-black text.   Presumably I can get the other volumes too from the same site.

But a typical "raw" SBJ entry that I can extract from my HTML ZHB file can have 5-10 segments that were white-on-black, interspersed with black-on-white segments.  I suspect that it would be hard for me to identify the former by looking at the scanned images.  I would have to visually compare the shapes of traditional hanzis one at a time (instead of "reading" them, as you would do).

One difficulty that may seem trivial to you is that the digital version is displayed horizontally on my screen, while the scanned images use the vertical layout.

But thank you very much for your offer to help and for the tips about possible sources for the files.  I will first try to find a digital file (text, not images) of the ZHB with the white-on-black markup; that would solve my problem with minimum work.

All the best, --stolfi

[JoJo_Jost]

I knew this word-based dependency would come up as a counterargument, which is why I also mentioned the “neither nor” example. But “sh” simply behaves differently—across all tokens, whether they’re Happaxe or not, “sh” is drawn to “qo.” A character within a word and NOT at the end of a character, as in Chinese. Your objection doesn’t explain that...

[Jorge_Stolfi]

@ Stolfi Then you have a serious problem—since these effects occur not only with “sh” but also with other letter combinations. 

Unfortunately, that disproves your theory.

Unfortunately that only proves that you will accept any claim, without checking, if it contradicts the Chinese origin theory.   

People still claim that Voynichese cannot be natural language because it has many repeated words and phrases, and "that does not happen in any natural language";

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....

And certainly not if `qo = "and" were the case. Because "and" has no side effects, since it’s a list

I don't understand this point.  Compare the sentences

• Lichee qumquat durian sweet nutritious
  

with 

• Lichee and qumquat and durian sweet and nutritious
  

Isn't the second easier to parse (for a Westerner) than the first?

before you start a list, no one knows that it’s about to start or how long it will last

In the spoken version produced by the Dictator, there would be hints about the syntax structure in the form of pauses, emphasis, speed.  Thus he would read the first sentence above somewhat like this

• Lichee, qumquat, durian: sweet, nutritious.
  

But punctuation was still like quantum computing at that time.

Moreover, the Author surely copied and edited his dictation notes when preparing the final draft for the Scribe.  If he did not insert the "qo"s during or just after the dictation, he would have inserted them at that point.

All the best, --stolfi

[JoJo_Jost]

Addendum:

Sh appears 99% of the time at the beginning or in the middle of a word, so the character that signals the “qo” beginning of the next word is practically never the last character—which means your argument about the last sound doesn't hold up.

And here's the table for reference:

   
"qo" at start of the following word, by frequency of the preceding word. Words containing sh, ch or k exclusively (glyphs atomic, no other of the three in the same word). Transitions counted within the same line only; n = occurrences that have a following word in the line. EVA z3b, whole manuscript.


So it's not about word dependencies; the dependency is everywhere...

Unfortunately that only proves that you will accept any claim, without checking, if it contradicts the Chinese origin theory.   

Unfortunately, that just proves that you won't accept any claim that contradicts the theory of Chinese origin. 

[JoJo_Jost]

I buy houses and horses and cows and mice.

Nothing can tell you how often an “and” will appear in a list—that's impossible, since you can extend the chain endlessly—that's what I meant. And before the first “and,” they don’t know if an “and” will appear at all: I buy houses—there’s no indication whether an “and” will appear or not.

So how is a "Sh" at the beginning of the word supposed to know that an “and” follows? That’s nonsense!

[ololololo]

There is no such thing as real "proof" outside of mathematics. There are only probabilities.

Well, then your theory isn’t proven; it’s just a possibility

It is impossible to avoid that conclusion if you try transcribing any significant part of the VMS from the scanned images (as I did -- 80% of the text since last year, not counting what I transcribed back in the 1990s).

And they definitely exist, I’m not arguing that. But there’s a problem: when you say that the scribe made mistakes several times, writing the words kaiin, laiin, and dain instead of daiin, that’s an assumption, because it can’t be proven in any way, but without it, the SPS = SBJ theory falls apart.

I never claimed there was some "lunar month" stuff in the VMS.

Sorry, I added a bit of my own Someone was explaining the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. diagrams during the lunar month.

As I explained back in 2002, I was forced to accept the theory that Voynichese was a phonetic rendering of a monosyllabic language because of the results I got while trying to prove that it was not natural language.

Let me explain why I mentioned phonetics. I don’t consider this an assumption, but again, in the case of daiin kaiin laiin, this is also an assumption (maybe the author heard it that way and wrote it down). But here, perhaps, I got carried away and wasn’t entirely right…

I did not say that it was "the only one of its kind". I said that it is the only one I know that can plausibly explain why the VMS looks that way and why it was created.

The author wrote a book in phonetic Chinese on strange folios, contacted various Chinese people to have their works dictated to him, and upon returning to Europe, he decided to abruptly abandon his great endeavor to enlighten Europeans about Asian medicine, hired inept scribes, and made them copy his drafts so that he could sell them...
This is more of a fairy tale than an explanation. And I see a contradiction — if the author wanted to enlighten Europe with knowledge of Chinese medicine, why, upon returning to his homeland, did he lose hope and decide to simply sell this book?
And why is the explanation “someone wrote a book and encrypted it” suddenly no longer simple, logical, and at the same time obvious?

More precisely, it looks like a collection of ~4 separate books that include a herbal, a materia medica, an astronomical and astrological treatise, and a treatise that may be about anatomy of about medicinal baths.

But that "explanation" alone does not explain why the Author had to devise a new alphabet, why the glyph look like that, why it had to be encrypted but at the same time it had to be illustrated with bizarre diagrams and "bathing" scenes. It does not explain the complex word structure; the absence of identifiable articles, pronouns, copulas, etc.; the repeated words; and a lot more.

I’m telling you — it’s a reference guide. You looked at the required plant, looked at the required diagram. 
An unknown alphabet and its peculiarities? Roman numerals also look strange, and the Bavarian cipher looks very strange as well.
Was what you’re talking about in the Copiale cipher, for example (if we don’t remove the nulls)?

Call it how you wish, but that was a deduction that followed from comparing the longest SBJ recipe ("red rooster") to the longest single-star parag of the SPS (f105v.32)

I can really call it whatever I wish. For me, the recipe in which you:
1). will make the fewest assumptions to ensure compliance.
2). can identify most of the characters

Another possible explanation is that the Author had some difficulty distinguishing the sounds of k, d, and l as pronounced by the Dictator.

If the author understood what this word was, but had difficulty distinguishing the sounds, he would probably have realized that kaiin = laiin = daiin, and would have written it down correctly.
If he didn’t understand what they were telling him, why did he write this book in the first place?

That the Scribe was sloppy is also an observation from the text and drawings of the whole book.

I was referring to the cliché of Scribe’s mistakes.

That is silly. YOU may say that those coincidences that I pointed out are not enough to make you believe in the SPS=SBJ claim. But cryptographers would jump on their seats if they found much less than that in their puzzles.

What didn’t satisfy you about my example with Carmen Arvale? Do you not like it? But wait, isn’t that, in essence, also an ideal match? The author just made a mistake with two words, nothing to worry about. Or it could have been done by his silly scribe.
Don’t you think I’ve proven that Quire 13 = Carmen Arvale? 
I literally reproduced your own methods and your own logic.

And yes, cryptographers would jump, but even that wouldn’t make me believe that the comparison with the Red Rooster fully proves the Chinese theory