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It is not Chinese
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It is not Chinese
dashstofsk > 09-06-2025, 08:53 AM
A number of people have suggested that the VMS might be in some Chinese language.
I think it is unlikely that this is so, but I am still curious to know what people might think.
The manuscript was written by at least three people, possibly five. And who were they writing for? For themselves, or for other Chinese? Could there really have been that many of them in the whole of Europe, in the time of the manuscript, when trade routes were not that well established, to justify writing in that language? But also why invent a new alphabet when they could have just written in the Chinese script which hardly any European would have been able to read?
There is also a problem with any language that uses tones for meaning, as highlighted nicely in
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RE: It is not Chinese
Koen G > 09-06-2025, 09:16 AM
Even if it were a tonal language with some tonal differences ignored, Voynichese entropy would still be too low. And a whole range of other, more fundamental problems. How can we start assigning a language when glyph parsing remains a challenge and LAAFU/PAAFU effects remain unresolved? -
RE: It is not Chinese
ReneZ > 09-06-2025, 10:06 AM
(09-06-2025, 08:53 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A number of people have suggested that the VMS might be in some Chinese language.
This goes way back. First Jacques Guy and later Jorge Stolfi. I am not too much aware of any others.
(09-06-2025, 08:53 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The manuscript was written by at least three people, possibly five.
We have to be careful here. There may have been five scribes, but these may just have been copyists, or people following a common set of rules. This is probably not an argument that can be used for or against this.
(09-06-2025, 08:53 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is also a problem with any language that uses tones for meaning,
There is no problem with languages that use tones for meaning. I use this every day.
The main issue with the 'Chinese' theory is indeed the lack of exposure of these languages to central Europe of the early 15th century.
An issue is also that an untrained ear would very unlikely be able to record any spoken tonal language properly. (As an interesting consequence of that, meaning would be lost, which might explain several issues with the Voynich MS text. anyway...)
(09-06-2025, 09:16 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Even if it were a tonal language with some tonal differences ignored, Voynichese entropy would still be too low.
As a side not to: "Even if....", note that while Chinese does not show the tones in their writing, other languages do or at least partially (e.g. Thai and Vietnamese). This may be a modern thing though.
Low entropy can be achieved with targeted rules, and especially with tones, which could be written at the end of each word. This would result in a small set (say 4 or 5) of characters that can end words.
And that is exactly what we are seeing.
Here are some nice examplesof correspondences between frequent Voynich and frequent Chinese words showing this:
daiin = da3 = ta (high tone) which means he, she or it. A perfect word to be most frequent.
chol = cho4 = shi (falling tone) which means to be. Verbs unchanged in all tenses. Also a great word
chor = cho2 = shi (rising tone) many meanings, e.g. 'period of time'
Now I do not believe at all that this is correct, but it is still remarkable.
And indeed, this cannot be kept up very long with other voynich words.
So: statistically this is super interesting. Historically it is very challenging. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Koen G > 09-06-2025, 10:53 AM
Interesting indeed. I hadn't yet considered that the recording of tones might result in lower entropy. Still shaky though: I strongly suspect that any real experiment run along these lines would hit a brick wall sooner rather than later. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Rafal > 10-06-2025, 01:57 PM
In my opinion you are exaggerating the problem with tones. Vietnamese is a tonal language, yet it is today written with Latin letters.
The tones are solved simply with diacritical marks:
![[Image: pic.png]](https://i.ibb.co/qMJCxsr4/pic.png)
So you end with let's say 40 symbols (let's count a letter with a diacritical mark a separate symbol) and not 26 but that's all. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 10-06-2025, 11:37 PM
As I wrote in another thread, I don't think it is Chinese specifically, but any language with monosyllabic "words" (even if, as in Mandarin or Vietnamese, most of our words would be compounds of two or three if its "words"). That would include all the languages of at least three families recognized by linguists, Dra-Kadai (Tai-Kadai), Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan. That is a few hundred different, mutually unintelligible languages... "Chinese theory" is just a convenient nickname for it.
The character entropy (predictability of the next character given the previous few characters) is problematic to compute (because it requires knowing what the actual characters are) and even more problematic to interpret (because it is a feature of the writing system, not of the language; see the discussion of tonal marks above). More interesting is the word entropy (predictability of the next word given the previous few words). IIRC, Rene computed this number some 25 years ago, and came up with ~10 bits per word -- which, IIRC, was quite within the range of other natural languages. I may have confirmed this myself.
The "Chinese" theory in fact can explain several features of the VMs that other theories can't explain, or simply ignore altogether. Mainly, why the Author decided to write the VMs, how he/she chose the contents, why he/she decided to invent a totally new script (instead of using Latin letters or some other existing script), why the characters have that particular look, why the words have that peculiar structure, why doubled words are common, what the "starred parags" section is about and why it has that format... And the motivation for creating a new script was not to conceal the contents of the book; quite the opposite, it was to make the contents accessible, if only to the author himself.
With all due respect for the expertise of the experts who see multiple scribes, I still think that it is very likely that there was a single Scribe (who probably was not the Author!). For one thing, the VMS is quite unlike all the manuscripts on which those experts have built their expertise upon. As Lisa observed, what makes handwriting into a fingerprint of the writer is years of practice writing in the same script and language -- which is very unlikely to be the case of the VMs Scribe (or scribes). Anyway, the observed differences in handwriting between certain pages can have several explanations, and IMHO are dwarfed by the similarities. The shape of every glyph can vary enormously within a single page, so it cannot be used as a criterion for distinguishing scribes. But we can discuss this point in another thread. -
RE: It is not Chinese
ReneZ > 11-06-2025, 01:30 AM
With respect to Vietnamese, the alphabetic writing system with (lots of) diacritics is modern.
There was no alphabetic writing of it in the 15th century.
An alphabetic writing system for Thai arose in the 15th century, according to tradition.
This only indicated tones in specific cases.
In general, one can safely assume that any 15th century rendition of an East Asian language would have to be either a rendition of sounds, or a transliteration of a much larger alphabet of chinese-like characters. If it ever happened.
I am not aware of any original examples. They do arise as a result of all the later missionary contacts.
Indication of tones in writing is not at all something that was usually done, at least before modern romanisations.
Many of the monosyllabic Asian languages have adopted loan words from Indic languages (Sanskrit, Pali) as a result of the spread of Buddhism. Such words are mostly polysyllabic. I am not sure about the timing of this though. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2025, 02:07 AM
Also re the "Chinese theory":
The choice of an alphabetic (rather than syllabic) script, written left to right, makes it almost certain that the Author was an European. The analysis of castle and dress drawings by Koen and others makes it almost certain that the Scribe was from Northern Italy. There have been probably hundreds of Europeans who visited East Asia in that epoch; Marco Polo was only the best known one, by no means the only one. Only a few of those have been recorded by history. I recall that another Venetian merchant spent a few years in Myanmar (Burma) buying gemstones to sell in Europe. Another one visited Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1500s. And Rafal surely must know about Gaspar da Gama... -
RE: It is not Chinese
Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2025, 03:08 AM
(11-06-2025, 01:30 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In general, one can safely assume that any 15th century rendition of an East Asian language would have to be either a rendition of sounds [...] Indication of tones in writing is not at all something that was usually done, at least before modern romanisations.
Well, if the Chinese theory is correct, the VMS may become notable as the first example of a phonetic transcription of a tonal language...
Transcriptions of tonal languages that omit tones are usually limited to person and place names, or isolated words like "feng shui" and "kung fu". It would be totally pointless to transcribe whole sentences that way.
The Author surely knew the language well enough to devise a script for it. He must have been well aware of the "shi shi shi" problem. Thus his script had to encode the tones too.
BTW, the modern Pinyin script for Mandarin, using diacritics for the tones, was devised by Jesuit Matteo Ricci around 1580, and used in his Mandarin-Latin dictionary published in Rome. His story may be interesting as an example of interaction and culture exchanges between European travelers and local scholars.
BTW too, I recall finding references to a Vietnamese-Latin dictionary that would have been written by Portuguese missionaries around 1510-1520, thus before Ricci's. Since Vietnamese is (and presumably was already) a tonal language, their dictionary must have used some encoding of the tones too. Unfortunately I could not find anything else about that story.
Quote:An alphabetic writing system for Thai arose in the 15th century, according to tradition. This only indicated tones in specific cases.
That system worked because it was used by native speakers of the language, who could infer the tone from context. Just as the Italian script does not mark the stressed syllable, and only rarely identifies the two sounds "o" and the two sounds of "e"; which is a big problem for non-native learners. Or just as the Hebrew script does not write short vowels.
But if the Author spoke the language imperfectly, as expected of someone who lived in the place for only a few years, he would need to record the tone for almost all words. -
RE: It is not Chinese
Koen G > 11-06-2025, 08:40 AM
What do we see when Europeans used to alphabetic writing approach a language without alphabetic writing? Do they invent a new script or do they Romanize?
The answer is almost invariably the second, and with a good reason: you want to make reading the language easier for people trained in the Latin script, so you make it as much like Latin script as possible. If Voynichese is seen as an invented alphabet, this would argue against such a scenario.