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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
ololololo > Yesterday, 12:36 AM
(08-06-2026, 09:40 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Thank you very much for your response! I understand your opinion, but I stand by my decision(07-06-2026, 04:39 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It sounds strange that you know the source text but can't guess the language, especially in the context of language theory.
Why is it strange? The way I got to that conclusion does not depend on the language, and does not give any information about it. Except the meaning (but not the sound!) of one Voynichese word.
Quote:... you have a huge amount of materials on the phonology of that time (thanks to the comparativists).
But I don't know Mandarin or any other "Chinese" language. So I will leave that part of the work for others...
Quote:... if the author were writing Chinese using an invented system, then this system should be at least easy for Europeans to understand, but at the same time, he clearly sought to convey the phonetics most accurately.
Try to imagine the situation. The most pressing concern must have been to record what the Dictator was saying, without slowing him down too much. Only in second place, the notation should let him later read what he wrote and (if he had the time) ask some doctor to please explain what "bèn tún" meant, so that he could put that in his glossary.
Quote:... the Voynich manuscript was created not only for one author, but also for someone else).
But what we have is not what the Author created when he was in "China". It is a clean copy that he had created back in Europe. Possibly when he has old and almost but not quite poor.
This copy was indeed created for others. By that time he still must have ignored the meaning of most words and compounds. But maybe he hoped to sell it to some curious scholar or doctor. Or created the copy for such a friend or heir.
Quote:If the book turns out to be incomprehensible (because, as you say, the author could be incompetent in the field of Chinese medicine), then why did he write it at all? Where can it be used in this form?
As Baresch himself wrote to Kircher, "From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. [...] In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value)."
Quote:the author has written about 270 pages in total, drawn many diagrams, charts, and plants... without understanding what he is writing about?
He certainly knew that it was the most revered book of pharmacy in "China", and must have been fluent enough in the language to know that it listed remedies for many diseases that he could identify.
He probably understood what "xìng hé rén" and "ē jiāo" were, and what condition "jīn chuāng" was. He may even have tried "má fén" himself when he was there, and as a result knew well what "jiàn guǐ" meant.
But the only drawings that were in his original draft were probably the plants parts of Pharma, the organs and vessels of Bio, and maybe rough sketches of some of the Cosmo diagrams, including the nine-rosette map. Al the plants in Herbal were probably made up, except for the few parts that he had sketched in Pharms; perhaps because he realized that no one in Europe, at that time, would buy a herbal without full-page drawings of the whole plants.
The only meaningful information in each Zodiac page is probably the circular text and the list of 15 or 30 labels; and that may be all that there was in his draft. The meaningful information contents of the nine-rosettes map diagram, apart from the text and labels, is probably only the arrangement of nine "islands" connected by causeways or bridges, with the bare "facts" (probably noted only in the text of his draft) that there was a volcano here, a castle there, six towers over there, etc..
Everything else, including the nymphs and the details of the "islands" and castles, was probably made up by the Scribe in Europe, with "inspiration" from other European books.
Quote:It may be shorthand, but that doesn't change the fact that you need to check the text itself rather than just speculating.
And I am checking the text of each recipe against the candidate parags. As shown in my PDF paper.
Quote:The point of this objection is that even if Voynich is readable, it would be completely incomprehensible to an ordinary European, even a merchant who had visited Asia, because it would be unclear how to read it.
An ordinary European would not understand a word from a book in Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, or even Greek. But many scholars would acquire such books and learn the language and script just to read them. Moretus, the Jesuit priest in Prague who carried the first letter by Barsch to Kircher, himself asked Kircher to identify the language and script in a bookled that he had. (It turned out to be Illyrian, which may be old Slovenian, in the Glagolitic script.)
The Author must have compiled a glossary of the language, not just for the book but by his own use while in "China". But it must have been on paper -- and most paper manuscripts of the time have rotted away, or were used by cooks and maids as fire starters.
Quote:if you've discovered something for one part of the manuscript, you'll need to try to apply it to all the other parts as well.
No I don't.
You are still thinking of the VMS as if it was a cryptographic puzzle. It is more like a "lost language" puzzle, like deciphering Etruscan or Linear A. The complete "solution" may take deecades, will be obtained a few words at a time, and my never be known in its entirety.
Comparison of the SPS with the SBJ should eventually give us several hundred words used in the latter -- mostly the names of diseases and Chinese plant and animal products, and the major organs. With luck, the Herbal and Pharma sections may be in the same language, and many of those words will be used there, too.
But that probably will not be of much help for Cosmo and even Bio. Unless we can identify other "Chinese" books that were the sources for those sections...
Quote: then you can potentially say more about the similarities between Voynichese and Chinese.
I can already say with some confidence that the SPS matches the Chinese text of the SBJ almost one word for one character.
But that would be the case for any of the 50+ Chinese "dialects". And even if "China" was actually (say) Vietnam, a doctor there would still have read the SBJ from a Chinese text, either with some pseudo-Chinese sound or by translating each character literally into Vietnamese, without regard for the (very different) Vietnamese grammar and word order.
Quote:The book doesn't contain a topic that is clearly related to China or, at least, to Chinese culture.
Medicine, herbalism, and astrology were much more important in Chinese culture than in the European one. The main medical books used in the 1400s had been composed with heavy State support and were widely available as woodblock prints.
What other books would the Author have chosen to transcribe? He would not have cared for Chinese mythology, philosophy, religion, history, ...
Quote:what do Rosettes mean in the context of Chinese culture?
I do not know what the nine-rosettes is meant to depict. It is not from the SBJ. Maybe someone will care to scan Chinese books that locals could have been recommended to the Author, and find the original source.
Maybe it was meant to be a schematic diagram of the world as known by locals. Perhaps the two "islands" with volcanoes represent Japan and the Philippines...
Maybe it depicts a mythical faraway archipelago with gold-paved streets and trees that yield rubies and emeralds and armored pigs that dig burrows and fierce people who make tortillas from a strange yellow wheat with foot-long ears...
Quote:Why, if the Rosettes are a map, do we see patterns on it that resemble European architecture?
We don't see any "European patterns". Is there any place in Europe that could be depicted as nine-islands connected by causeways in that pattern? Or any depiction of an imaginary place like that in an European book?
The castles look European, but the draft probably said only "draw a castle here" and the Scribe made up the rest.
And in fact one of the towers looks like an Islamic minaret, and the six towers at the center look Russian or Persian, not European...
Quote:Or the balneological section?
Unlike European books, Chinese books did not avoid anatomical descriptions and drawing; which is probably the true topic of Bio.
Quote:all the sources tell me that it's not an encyclopedia, but a book about plants and agriculture.
The SBJ is indeed a materia medica: a terse list of remedies and their indications. There are only a few mentions of alchemical uses of the substances (for instance, it says that chicken eggs can be turned into amber.) Without methods of preparation (which presumably would be the job of pharmacists) or dosages (which would be decided by each doctor for each case).
The original (from ~300 BCE) said nothing about cultivation or harvesting of the herbs. Brief notes about the latter were added to it over the next 800 years, and were included in the massive medieval encyclopedias; but were apparently omitted by the Author.
Quote:It may not be a reference book, but it is at least a book that can be used regularly.
The big medieval encyclopedias that included the SBJ surely were working reference books -- in "China". It seems that in Korea the SBJ was even an obligatory subject in medicine courses.
However, the transcription that the Author brought to Europe could not be used as a reference book. At best, another European author could glean from it some new uses for European herbs, that he would include in his own book.
Quote: Most likely. But this doesn't explain why Voynichese is so resistant to research and why we still have difficulty understanding it.
On the contrary, it explains it. Most people who have tackled the VMS went down the same wrong path: "The material is European, the glyph shapes and writing direction and text layout are European, the Zodiac signs are European, the castles clothes hats look European -- "therefore" the book was written in Europe by an European Author, and it is either gibberish or in an European language. And since we have ruled out a simple substitution cipher for the latter, it must be some complicated cipher."
But no cipher is as hard to crack as a natural language that is different from any language you know...
Quote:Perhaps this is true. But why did the author allow the scribe he hired to write something unclear?
I don't understand what you are referring to, sorry. The Author's handwriting on the draft was probably poor (and that could be one of the reasons for recruiting a Scribe for the clan vellum copy). He may have had poor eyesight, like Marci had when he sent the book to Kircher (and that could be another reason).
Even if the Author noticed errors by the Scribe, fixing them would have made the book uglier.
Quote:Let me remind you that you have the opportunity to correct all these mistakes
Thanks, that is quite generous of you.
All the best, --srolfi
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As a small tip, you could learn more about the historical context and compare the grammar of Voynichese with the grammar of Early Modern Chinese (of course, if you really want to do it). -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Ruby Novacna > Yesterday, 09:58 AM
Hi, Ololololo!
You don't have to quote an entire message to give your reply. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 10:24 AM
(11-06-2026, 11:45 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've outlined how the fact these are fully realized languages applies to Classical Chinese several times now, and why the differences are so hard on the COT ...
And I have explained several times why your objections are not valid...
Quote:I think that assumption does not sit with other assumptions you've made or conclusions you've drawn
Again, the scenario we are discussing (with the Dictator reading the white-on-black text from the ZHB or similar book in the local language,while the Author writes it down with his phonetic script) is only my best guess for how Starred Parags section (SPS) came to be a transcription or translation of SBJ, approximately one-hanzi-for-one-Voynichese-word. If you think that scenario is unlikely, what alternative do you propose instead?
Quote:Depending on where [the Standard language] it is being taught, it is sometimes realized with the prescribed standard pronunciation from Beijing, but in Guangdong specifically it is taught using a Guangzhou phonetic standard. ... To be fair, I have seen sources word this in a way that really does imply Standard Chinese with Guangzhou's pronunciation is simply Cantonese.
When you say "pronunciation" and "phonetic standard", I don't know whether you mean "accent" (like an Italian speaking French with a strong Italian accent) or "reading" (like an Italian reading aloud each printed French word as the equivalent Italian word: "il ne me plait pas de tout" --> "quello non mi piace niente di tutto").
Quote:Languages that are not Mandarin have different vocabulary, syntax, and particles, so regardless of phonology ... The differences exceed the linguistic diversity in the Romance family
Yes, the vocabularies of Mandarin and Cantonese (including particles) differ at least as much as the vocabularies of French and Italian, possibly more. I posted examples myself. That alone makes them not mutually intelligible.
As for the syntactic differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, they would be less important than those between the Classic and Colloquial forms of the written language. As you say:
Quote:The reason why the popular movements largely agreed to stop using the 2500 year old [written] language of the elite classes was because it was frigging hard to teach. Recitations [in any dialect] are hard to understand, it has remote grammar, and a large proportion (like, 80%+) of the [classical readings of] lexicon [in any dialect] had changed usage and/or meaning.
(Clarifications mine.)
If the dictator just read each hanzi in Cantonese (most likely, I think), the result would have been Cantonese with some obsolete Cantonese words and Old Chinese grammar. It would not be "Classic Chinese", which is only a written language; nor "Classic Mandarin with Cantonese accent". But, out of consideration for the Author, maybe the Dictator replaced some Classic word, constructions, and particles with colloquial Cantonese ones.
However, those syntactic differences -- either Mandarin/Cantonese or Classic/Colloquial -- are not important for this discussion, because the syntax of the SBJ is extremely simple. They would not significantly affect the Author's understanding of what the Dictator was reading, or of his notes after he went back to Europe.
That said, I think you are exaggerating the syntactic differences between the Chinese dialects. AFAIK, all the Chinese dialects lack articles, gender and number inflections for nouns and adjectives, and verb inflections; which are the main syntactic differences between Romance languages. What are the differences then? Adjective-noun order? Verb-subject-object order? AFAIK, they are the same in all dialects. No? Can you give examples?
Quote:It is sometimes hard to tell if they are glossing over the little hitch that Standard Chinese read this way is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese or genuinely in error
Are you sure? Again, are you confusing "read with Cantonese words" and "read with Mandarin words in a Cantonese accent"?
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 10:53 AM
(Yesterday, 12:07 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It passed through "雄鸡", which is an archaism only used in academic writings.
Yes, the SBJ uses many obsolete names for drugs and conditions. It even uses a couple of characters that (IIUC) had to be glossed in the ZHB as "([some character] with [another character]'s phonetic radical)" because it was no longer recognizable already in the 1700s.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > Yesterday, 11:21 AM
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RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 11:52 AM
(Yesterday, 12:36 AM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As a small tip, you could learn more about the historical context
What specifically do you mean? The publishing history of the Shennon Bencao? Or the history of contacts between Europe and East Asia?
Quote:compare the grammar of Voynichese with the grammar of Early Modern Chinese
By "Early Modern Chinese" that I suppose you mean "the spoken language that was spoken in the 1400s and later evolved into modern Mandarin".
I can't do that because I have not yet found how to read the Voynichese script, and I have identified only 3-4 words (and only 2 with some confidence).
And I don't know the language yet. Early Modern Mandarin is only one of 50+ possibilities.
And it is not even the most likely one. If the Author went by land, he may have stopped at any point after he reached Tibet. And the probability decreases with distance; so Northern China is more likely than Central which is more likely than East. If the last leg of his trip was by sea, the probability decreases as we go through Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and South China.
And I don't speak any of those languages -- not a bit. Not to mention how they were 600 years ago.
And one must not trust language reconstructions (or any other theory) by linguists. They have the bad habit of mixing evidence-based deductions with pure guesses, without indicating which is which.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Linda > 8 hours ago
(Yesterday, 11:52 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I can't do that because I have not yet found how to read the Voynichese script, and I have identified only 3-4 words (and only 2 with some confidence)
I must have missed this, if you posted them before. What are they?
Also I had a question about whether you may have developed a page ordering for quire 20 based on any of your crib matches or basic lengths of paragraphs? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > 7 hours ago
(8 hours ago)Linda Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What are [your cribs]?
For sure: 主 = "mainly for" --> daiin (but sometimes dain, kaiin, laiin, dair; or abbreviated as dam).
Almost sure: 气 = "vital energy" --> chedy (but sometimes cheda, cheky, shedy, ...)
The former (zhǔ in modern Mandarin) almost always introduces the list of diseases that the drug is good for. The latter (qì in modern Mandarin) is a fundamental concept of Chinese medical theory: some sort of energy or impalpable fluid that IIUC) carries the energy of food from the stomach and spleen to the lower abdomen and maybe other parts.
The other cribs are still to uncertain to list. Please wait until I can confirm them...
Quote:Also I had a question about whether you may have developed a page ordering for quire 20 based on any of your crib matches or basic lengths of paragraphs?
I see the importance but have not looked hard into it yet.
One problem that makes that question harder is that here are still recipes that have only relatively poor matches among the available SPS parags, or multiple matches with similar quality.
Another problem is that I can use only 243 of the 365 parags that the SPS must have contained originally. Apart form the four missing pages, I must exclude parags that have two or more stars in the margin, since they are likely to be two or more parags mashed together. So, offhand I must expect that about 1/3 of the recipes will have no matching parag.
At first I was bothered by the apparent absence of any correlation between the order of the recipes in my SBJ file and the order of the matching parags in the SPS. But not long ago I was told that I was using the wrong SBJ file. The original order of the recipes in the Author's draft must have been their order in the book from which the Dictator was reading. This book was probably the Zhenghe Bencao or a similar medical encyclopedia. The order of the recipes in the ZHB seems to be very different from the order in my first file (and the text of the recipes has small but crucial differences too -- like one extra 主 in the "red rooster" recipe).
I am now going through the ~60 recipes that I had already tried to match, updating their Chinese text to the ZHB version, and then looking again for matching parags. I am about halfway through those 60. Then there are another ~300 that I have not tried yet...
It is a slow process because I must rely on Google AI and other lalamos to translate each entry and make sure that the text is indeed the SBJ one, free from later interpolations. That alone takes at least one hour for each recipe. Then I must prepare the data for my matching programs and examine the output to decide whether the matches it found are convincing.
I need the translation because there are some parts of each entry that were systematically omitted by the Author, like the classification of each drug within Chinese medical theory (like 味甘微温 = "[red roosters] are sweet and slightly warming"), alternative (Chinese) names, its "provenance" (like 生平泽 = "[red roosters] grow on plains and marshes"), and some other occasional information that made sense only locally (like 东门上者尤良 = "[the heads of the red roosters] that were hung above the East Gate are particularly good for repelling demons").
Fortunately most of these omitted parts were at the beginning or end of the recipe, and thus do not interfere with the recipe-parag matching criterion.
So,I will answer your query as soon as I get enough convincing matches...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
eggyk > 7 hours ago
(7 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I need the translation because there are some parts of each entry that were systematically omitted by the Author, like the classification of each drug within Chinese medical theory (like 味甘微温 = "[red roosters] are sweet and slightly warming"), alternative (Chinese) names, its "provenance" (like 生平泽 = "[red roosters] grow on plains and marshes"), and some other occasional information that made sense only locally (like 东门上者尤良 = "[the heads of the red roosters] that were hung above the East Gate are particularly good for repelling demons").
Are all of these sections later additions or would they have been present in the SBJ when this dictation took place? -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > 3 hours ago
(Yesterday, 11:52 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What specifically do you mean? The publishing history of the Shennon Bencao? Or the history of contacts between Europe and East Asia?
Historical context - what the Chinese language was like back then, as well as more about Chinese traditional medicine (well, this will help with the balneology section, as it's possible that the liquid flowing through the pipes is qi. This will allow you to link a specific page to a specific topic, such as acupuncture). Anyway, It's always useful to learn something new .
(Yesterday, 11:52 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And I don't speak any of those languages -- not a bit. Not to mention how they were 600 years ago.
It's not that bad. It's enough to be able to read Chinese to understand the phonetics.
P.S. I've learned to quote at your request. Finally