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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
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 03:56 PM
(Yesterday, 01:20 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What hieroglyph might this be similar to?
You mean this one:
I don't know. Like for the other two, there are many Chinese characters that could have been the source for this one...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > Yesterday, 06:14 PM
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RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Koen G > Yesterday, 08:20 PM
(Yesterday, 03:56 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know. Like for the other two, there are many Chinese characters that could have been the source for this one...
Flipped upside down like in your image, the bottom glyph looks exactly like red-initial T was written in some MSS. Bird glyph has been found as red-capital V. The "smoke" thing is like Z. That gives you the last chunk of an alphabetic list, with y missing: t - (uvw) - z -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Jorge_Stolfi > Today, 12:59 AM
(Yesterday, 08:20 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Flipped upside down like in your image, the bottom glyph looks exactly like red-initial T was written in some MSS. Bird glyph has been found as red-capital V. The "smoke" thing is like Z. That gives you the last chunk of an alphabetic list, with y missing: t - (uvw) - z
So page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. would not be the first? It would be the last four entries of the "table of contents"? index? (But you are joking, right?)
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
Koen G > 7 hours ago
I don't know what it is or what it's supposed to be, my comment is more about multi-interpretability, the bane of Voynich research. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
chenxiang > 5 hours ago
(25-09-2026, 10:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(24-09-2026, 04:34 PM)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.First, regarding your Pinyin data: it is true that adjacent syllables in Chinese show statistical tendencies (e.g., a syllable ending in 'g' is often followed by one starting with 's'). However, this is a phenomenon of adjacent phonetic assimilation and high-frequency word collocations (词汇搭配), not a grammatical or structural dependency.
In Chinese, the influence of a syllable's final sound strictly applies to the immediately following syllable within the same phrase. It does not extend across word boundaries to mechanically govern the distant structure of an unrelated word ... not a "long-distance effect." In the VMS, as JoJo_Jost and others have shown, the sh/ch at the end of a word strongly affects the qo at the beginning of the next word, ... This kind of mechanical, cross-boundary, long-range statistical dependency is not a feature of natural Chinese syntax or phonology.
What you are discussing is sandhi effects on vowel and consonant quality, not just tone. Yes, sandhi in general, being a phonological process, acts only on the adjacent phonemes of consecutive words.
But sandhi is not the only cause of statistical correlations between phonemes (or letters) in conscecutive words! In fact it is the least important cause. As I explained in my replies to @JoJo_Jost, the main cause is correlations between consecutive words, especially very common ones, that happen to use those characters; and these correlations in turn are due mostly to semantics and to the grammar -- not to the phonemes (or letters) in question.
For instance, in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there are 60667 words. Of them, 4157 (6.9%) are i-words -- words that begin with the letter "i". Therefore, if the words were chosen at random, independently from the adjacent words, we expect that any given word, or any given set of words, will be followed by an i-word in 6.9% of the cases.
But if we look at the th-words (words that begin with "th") in that text we find that only 4.6% of them (361 out of 7857) are followed by an i-word.
Should we say then that "there is a long-range repulsion between the "th" at the beginning of a word and the "i" at the beginning of the next word (or vice-versa)"? (And therefore "That text cannot be natural English"? ...?!?)
No. While that statement is true (if we take "repulsion" to mean just "negative correlation"), it is misleading because it suggest that it is the letters "th" that repel the letter "i". But if we look at the individual th-words, this is what we see:
ANY 4167/60667 6.87%
th... 361/7857 4.59%
that 98/793 12.36%
this 23/250 9.20%
the 173/4764 3.63%
then 30/171 17.54%
they 3/342 0.88%
them 11/187 5.88%
Here the notation "M/N P%" means that M of the N occurrences of the word at left, that is P percent of those occurrences, are followed by an i-word.
So we can see that, while there is a definite "i-word repulsion" for some words, including "the", "they", and "them" (which all have P lower than the expected 6.87%), for some other words, including "that", "this" and "then", there is "i-word attraction" instead.
The reason we see a repulsion for th-words as a whole is that their collective P (4.59%) is the average of the Ps of the indvidual th-words, weighted by the frequency of the word; and the th-words with repulsion, like "the", end up dominating this average.
And the same applies to the other side of the word gap. The word "that" is not attracted to i-words in general, but to specific words that happen to begin with "i". Namely
52 that i
22 that it
9 that in
6 that is
1 that idea
1 that if
1 that ill
1 that incredible
1 that intelligent
1 that its
1 that indeed
There are many non-i-words that can follow "that". But it so happens that, on the whole, those pairs with an i-word on the right account for 12.36% of all occurrences of "that", which happen to be more than the frequency of i-words in general.
As you can see, the apparent attraction of "that" for i-words is not a property of the letter "i", but partly a consequence of the grammar (that restricts what follows to certain types of sentences, which happen to often begin with "it", "its", "in", "is", and "if") and mostly due to the semantics and the contents of the text (a first-person narrative, where the subject of many sentences is the pronoun "I").
And the same happens in the VMS. The apparent attraction between Sh-words and the following qo-words is not a property of the characters Sh and qo. It is due to certain words that happen to start with Sh being "attracted" to certain words that happen to start with "qo"; and these cases happening to dominate when the attractions and repulsions are added together.
And anomalies of this sort happen in any meaningful text in any natural language, for the same reasons.
They happen in the Shennong Bencao Jing (SBJ) too. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a digital version of it that I obtained from the net and converted to Mandarin pinyin via Google Translate, several months ago. (The original file had many erros, and differed in many details from the SBJ quoted in the Zhenghe Bencao. My edits and conversion to pinyin must have added many more errros. But the errors should not have a significant impact on what follows.)
Instead of looking for "influences" between adjacent words, let's look at attraction or repulsion between certain initial consonants in words that are two positions apart -- that is, between word t[k] and word t[k+2]. That hopefully will make the results independent of sandhi effects.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of counts and frequencies for the initial consonant pairs of words (sylables) t[k] and t[k+2] from that file.
In the bottom "TT" (totals) row, you can see that 568 out the 12537 syllables t[k+2] (4.5%) begin with the pinyin consonant "g". Therefore, if syllables were generated at random, without regards for the context, we would expect that, for any given word X (or any set of words X), about 4.5% of its occurrences t[k] would be followed, two words ahead, by some word t[k+2] that starts with "g".
But the table shows that, in fact, 254 (21.9%) of all the 1160 tokens t[k] that start with "sh" are followed at t[k+2] by tokens that starts with "g". That is, the initial consonant "sh" strongly attracts the initial consonant "g" even through the intervening word!
On the other hand, only 15 (1.8%) of all 831 tokens t[k] that start with "x" are followed by tokens t[k+2] that start with "g". That is, the initial "x" repels the initial "g" even across the intervening word!
But of course these statements are misleading. What is happening is that there are certain triples of words X Y Z that occur more often than expected by chance, where X is a sh-word and Z is a g-word:
123 shēng shān gǔ
100 shēng chuān gǔ
6 shí wèi gān
2 shēng píng gǔ
1 shēng gāo gǔ
1 shēn wèi gān
1 shāng kǒu gān
1 shāng bǔ gǔ
3 shān shān gǔ
1 shān píng gǔ
3 shān chuān gǔ
1 shā xié guǐ
1 shā wèi gān
1 shā chóng gǔ
1 shā bǎi guǐ
1 shí zhū guǒ
1 shí zhū guān
1 shí zhī gè
1 shí shā gǔ
1 shí chuāng gēn
1 shé shì gǔ
1 shuǐ shā gǔ
1 shuǐ dào gēn
That is, the "attraction" is not between the consonants "sh" and "g", but between the word "shēng" and (two words ahead) the word "gǔ"
Thus the Sh-qo "attraction" reported by @JoJo_Jost is NOT evidence that the VMS is an artificial text generated by algorithm. Quite the opposite, it is another feature that is shared with natural language texts, and is NOT expected in a text that is generated word by word by some manual random process.
And here I should repeat two bits of advice that I posted recently to the net:
- Don't waste time computing character-based statistics (character and n-gram frequencies, character entropy, character correlations as function of distance or position, etc.). Study word statistics instead.
- Never make any claim about statistics of natural languages, no matter how "obviously true", without checking it first. You will often be surprised.
(And as for advice #2, in a recent reply to @JoJo_Jost I claimed without checking that in English there is an attraction between th-words and i-words, because I thought that "obviously" the pairs "that is" and "this is" would dominate the counts. But in fact, as shown above, the repulsive word "the" is so common that the sum of all th/i attractions and repulsions is a net repulsion.)
All the best, --stolfi
Dear Jorge,
Thank you for the further clarification and the "sheng + gu" example. You are absolutely right: the "attraction" is not between the letters "sh" and "g", but between the words "sheng" and "gu". I agree entirely that this is a manifestation of lexical collocation driven by semantics in natural Chinese.
However, this is exactly where the distinction between natural language and the VMS becomes crucial. Let me explain why your example reinforces my point rather than disproving it.
In natural Chinese, the dependency between "sheng" and "gu" exists because of meaning. If I change the context—for example, if I use a different word that also ends in "sheng" but has a completely different meaning (like "sheng" meaning "victory" instead of "birth")—the statistical attraction to "gu" will immediately disappear or change drastically. This is because the dependency is tied to the specific semantic field (e.g., a specific medical formula). It is context-dependent and meaning-driven.
Now, look at the VMS. The sh -> qo dependency identified by JoJo_Jost and others occurs blindly across all tokens. It does not matter what the supposed meaning of the word is, or what section of the manuscript it is in. The dependency is uniform, mechanical, and completely oblivious to any semantic content.
In natural language, word collocations are driven by meaning. In the VMS, the dependency is driven by a mechanical/algorithmic rule. If the VMS were a direct phonetic transcription of a natural Chinese text, we would expect the sh and qo dependencies to appear only in specific contexts where their corresponding Chinese words naturally collocate. But that is not what we see.
Therefore, your data actually demonstrates that while natural Chinese does have word-level dependencies, the VMS has a context-blind mechanical dependency. This supports the idea that the VMS is either a complex cipher or a constructed system, rather than a direct transcription of a natural Chinese text. If it is Chinese, it has gone through a highly mechanical encoding process.
Best regards,
Chenxiang - Don't waste time computing character-based statistics (character and n-gram frequencies, character entropy, character correlations as function of distance or position, etc.). Study word statistics instead.
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RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
chenxiang > 5 hours ago
Quote:There is no classical text that supports the idea of mapping the VMS "things" to ...
Do you really mean "there is no classical text", or "I could not find any classical text"?
Speaking of which, here is another way you could help me. Suppose that the Dictation Scenario is true, and our Author has just decided to take some of the Chinese medical knowledge back to Europe.
He must have asked "Which of your medical books should I copy? One that gives a broad overview of your science, that is considered the most authoritative, etc etc?"
I supposed that the immediate answer must have been "The Zenghe Bencao here, of course. Its 26 volumes and 1000+ pages include the theory and experience of all our most respected doctors since 300 BCE..."
"A thousand pages? *Gasp*! I mean, what is the best book that I can hope to copy in my spare time, before I die?"
"Well, ... there is the Shennong Bencao Jing. It is only about 30 pages, but it is the very core and foundation of our pharmaceutical knowledge. It was written by the Divine Farmer himself, and ..."
So here is my question. After doing the SBJ, at some point our Author must have asked
"And about astronomy and astrology, which treatise do you recommend -- one that is short but gives a broad overview of your knowledge in those fields, especially the parts that are different from the science of Arabs and Indians?"
Any idea of which could have been the answer?
All the best, --stolfi
[/quote]
Dear Jorge,
Thank you for the clarification. I am glad we can agree that there is no classical text dividing a solar term into 15 parts.
Regarding your new question about which astronomy or astrology treatise the Author would have copied: I am afraid I cannot provide a specific book title, because I find the premise of the question to be rather problematic.
If a European traveler was in China and asked a local doctor, "What astronomy book should I copy to bring back to Europe?", the answer would likely be completely irrelevant to his actual needs. Medieval and early Renaissance Europe already had a highly developed and sophisticated astrological system based on Ptolemy, Arabic translations, and the Alfonsine Tables (as eggyk mentioned earlier).
If the Author wanted to enlighten Europeans about Chinese medicine, he might copy a herbal. But why would he abandon his familiar Ptolemaic astronomy and try to translate an official Chinese astronomical treatise—which was often closely guarded by the state (e.g., the Imperial Astronomical Bureau)—and then map it onto the European zodiac (Aries, Taurus, etc.)?
The VMS Zodiac section is undeniably European in its visual structure (Aries, Taurus, etc.), even if the internal division (24/30 parts) is unusual. If the Author brought back Chinese astronomy, why is there not a single Chinese constellation (like the 28 Mansions) visible?
Therefore, I do not think there is a Chinese astronomy book he should have copied. The inclusion of astronomy in the VMS is much more likely to be from his own European background, perhaps adapted to fit the structure of his special cipher or notes.
Best regards,
Chenxiang -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
chenxiang > 5 hours ago
Dear Jorge,
To be precise, when I said "no classical text," I meant that there is no classical text that fits the specific parameters of your "Dictation Scenario." There are certainly Chinese astronomical and astrological texts, but recommending one creates a paradox for your theory.
To answer your question directly: If the Author asked a Chinese scholar for a short, comprehensive treatise on Chinese astronomy and astrology that is fundamentally different from Arabic and Indian science, the answer would likely be "The Song of the Steps of the Sky" (步天歌, Butian Ge).
This is a classical Chinese poem written in the 7th century. It is precisely "short but broad," as it catalogs all 283 Chinese constellations (the Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions) in verse. It is fundamentally different from Arabic and Indian astronomy because it relies on an equatorial coordinate system centered on the North Pole, not the ecliptic (zodiac) system used in the West.
However, this leads to a fatal contradiction in your theory: If the Author copied "The Song of the Steps of the Sky" to bring Chinese astronomical knowledge back to Europe, why does the VMS Zodiac section exclusively feature European zodiac signs (Aries, Taurus, etc.)?
There are no Chinese constellations (like the Azure Dragon of the East) in the VMS. Instead, we see Western nymphs and European astrological symbols. If the Author was transcribing a Chinese astronomy book as you suggest, we would expect to see Chinese Mansions (宿) instead of European Signs.
Therefore, while I can provide a title, it does not support the idea that the VMS astronomy section is a translation of a Chinese text. The text and imagery in the VMS remain firmly rooted in European visual tradition, even if the author was exposed to Chinese medicine.
Best regards,
Chenxiang -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
chenxiang > 4 hours ago
(Yesterday, 06:14 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(Yesterday, 03:56 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there are many Chinese characters that could have been the source for this one...
We have clearer outlines of the shape and fine details. I think we should ask @chenxiang...
Alright Michael, I’ll focus on studying this issue recently. Give me some time to think of some reasonable guesses. By the way, can I upload photos in this forum section like you guys do? That might make the conclusions or problems easier to understand. If possible, please tell me a more detailed method. -
RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
ololololo > 4 hours ago
By the way, interpreting the red symbols as hieroglyphs could also support the theory of a hoax.
You’ve probably heard of pseudo‑Kufic writing (something like this).
The author might have known what the characters looked like (albeit very vaguely) or even had images of them, but he copied them very poorly, and then sold this document as “Chinese writing” or “a note on Chinese medicine".