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The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

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• The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  eggyk > 09-10-2026, 02:26 PM

  (09-10-2026, 01:34 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.He would need to just be able to recognize those hanzi.
  
  I myself don't know any Chinese language and I can't read written Chinese.  For the latter,I would have to know the shape and meanings of at least a thousand hanzi, and thousands of compounds thereof.  But I know a few dozen hanzi from the time I studied Japanese.  I can recognize those keywords and easily delete those fields.  In fact, my program does that automatically, with only a couple of python lines.

  
  This doesn't make sense. If he knew a few hanzi, he was by definition able to read and understand the classical text to a certain, limited degree. And you say some fields were quite complicated to understand, but that the VMS author understood enough to both recognise the beginning/end of such sections AND that he knew enough about the content to make a judgement call on whether to include it?
  
  This fundamentally means that someone had to have taught him the relevant characters and that he must have had certain sections explained to him in detail. The fact that some of the medicinal traditions were foreign to him seems to me to not be a good reason to leave those things out. I thought the entire point was to record information about this newly discovered medicine from the east.
  
  

  (09-10-2026, 01:34 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But a sensible Dictator would, at the very least, have used intonation to hint at the parsing.

  
  A sensible dictator would surely just read a sentence in his mind and then slowly orate the correct information in his local language one word at a time, instead of slowly transliterating into an incorrect mess. That dictator would also be hearing himself incorrectly say "red male chicken, flavor sweet  slightly warm, main, woman person burst inside drip", and would surely say to the VMS author "hey, you know this makes no sense writing it this way, right? I can just tell you what it says"
  
  I do not see the need for a symbol by symbol method at all. The translation method would be far more useful to the VMS author as he would have an entirely coherent set of information which would actually be useful if people were to go back and communicate with the same people again.  
  
  

  (09-10-2026, 01:34 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anyway, writing down those fields (or copying them to vellum) would have been a waste of time if the Author and/or the intended readers were not knowledgeable in Chinese medical theory (or did not believe in it).

  
  Okay, not including the parts at the end with bigger characters etc is actually a great example of why someone wouldn''t consider copying it. That makes sense to me. 
  
  However, stating what would and would not have been a waste of time is -at best- completely and totally arbitrary. For all we know, the VMS author was the leading world expert on foreign medicine and wanted to know all of the weirdest stuff the most. The only reason this is being put forward is as a justification for removing certain parts of the SBJ. 
  
  I would wager that if the tables were turned, and the matches were only good when including the full text, you would be here justifying exactly why he would want to copy it all. 
  
  Honestly, the far more upfront way of doing this would be to drop the theories / justifications for the removal process entirely and simply say that the SPS matches a heavily altered and trimmed SBJ text. I would more readily accept "I have no idea why the SBJ would have been heavily altered, but the SPS matches it" than hypotheticals on what someone chose 600 years ago.
  
  Talking about these other theories is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > 09-10-2026, 05:17 PM

  (09-10-2026, 01:34 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A literal one-word-per-hanzi reading of that Rooster recipe into English would be
  
  red male chicken flavor sweet  slightly warm main woman person burst inside drip down red white pour ... fatten fat grows plain marsh

  Even allowing you to select the most favorable gloss from the many homophonic and connotative alternatives (which very much begs the question here), I do not think this illustrates the communicative purpose and growing success of the Dictation Scenario like you think it does

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 09-10-2026, 07:08 PM

  (09-10-2026, 02:26 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If he knew a few hanzi, he was by definition able to read and understand the classical text to a certain, limited degree.

  
  Note, here we are discussing some ALTERNATIVE scenario where the Author somehow interacts with the printed text.
  
  The key word in your objection is "limited".
  
  Here is the full Red Rooster recipe, with those fields included.  In blue are the hanzi that I knew before I started working on the SPS=SBJ theory maybe a year ago.  In purple are those that I learned since then, in the process of carefully editing some 70 recipes and their translations:
  
  丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上者尤良
  肪主耳聋肠主遗溺肶胵裹黄皮主泄利屎白主消渴伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子主除热火疮痫痉
  可作虎魄神物鸡白蠹能肥脂生平泽
  
  And even those I know only in a weak sense, because I could easily confuse them with similar looking ones. 
  
  And most of those hanzi that I recognize are being used there as parts of compound terms that I don't know, or in senses that I don't know.  For example I know that 中 has the general meaning of "center/middle/interior" and related words like "central" or "middle".  But the compound 崩中 means something like "[vaginal] discharge from inside" while 温中 means something like "warming the [digestive] center".   I would never have guessed that.   I knew that 子 has the general meaning of "child/baby", and now I know that it can be also "larva" or "egg", but I still haven't memorized that 鸡 means "chicken" , so I would not recognize 鸡子 as meaning "chicken egg".  
  
  Basically, the only words I sort of accurately understand in that whole recipe are 女人 = "woman person", 头 = "head",  杀 = "kill", and the field keywords 味, 主, 生.
  
  If someone read that recipe aloud to me in any Chinese language, living or extinct, "Classic" or colloquial, I would not recognize or understand a single word of it.  If someone showed me the modern Mandarin reading in pinyin I might recognize a couple of syllables like jī = "chicken", zhǔ = 主, nǚ = "woman", and bái = "white"; but I would not be sure about the tones.
  
  On the other hand, someone who lived for a few years in any East Asian country should have been able to recognize al lot more spoken syllables and compounds if that recipe was read aloud in the local language, even if syllable by syllable.   He surely would have understood the parts in green below, and recognized the syllables in purple even if he could not recognize the compounds they were part of:
  
  丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上者尤良
  肪主耳聋肠主遗溺肶胵裹黄皮主泄利屎白主消渴伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子主除热火疮痫痉
  可作虎魄神物鸡白蠹能肥脂生平泽
  
  He would probably have understood the phrase 血闭 as "blood blockage" if it was read one syllable at a time "blood" + "block".  But it seems that in that part of f105v.32 there is nothing remotely similar to anything in the part where  止血 = "stop bleeding" would be.  However, the meaning of 血闭 = "blood blockage"in medical context is "amenorrhea", absence of menstruation.  So maybe the Dictator read 血闭 as another phrase in the local language that had that specific meaning and did not contain the syllable for "blood". 
  
  The brown parts 鬼东门上者尤良, 神物, and 鸡白蠹能肥脂 are non-medical comments that apparently were omitted from f105v.32.  The Author probably would have understood enough of the first sentence, "those [roosters? heads?] hung over the East gate are particularly potent [at killing ghosts]" to see that it was pointless to copy it.  Ditto for 神物 = "[amber is] a divine substance".  And presumably the Dictator himself would have told him that he coud not make sense of the last part 鸡白蠹能肥脂 = "chicken white grub can fatten fat".  
  
  

  Quote:And you say some fields were quite complicated to understand, but that the VMS author understood enough to both recognise the beginning/end of such sections AND that he knew enough about the content to make a judgement call on whether to include it?   This fundamentally means that someone had to have taught him the relevant characters

  Again, that objection would apply to some alternative scenario where the Author somehow worked on the hanzi.  In my preferred version of the Dictation Scenario, the Author probably did not know any characters at all.
  
  

  Quote:The fact that some of the medicinal traditions were foreign to him seems to me to not be a good reason to leave those things out. I thought the entire point was to record information about this newly discovered medicine from the east.

  The information in those omitted fields is mostly theoretical and would be useless in practice.  Even less useful than Culpeper's assignment of herbs to planets.  The non-omitted parts are all potentially useful, since they say that product X is good for condition Y or has the benefit Z.  Even if the Author did not understand X, Y, or Z right away, he could ask local doctors later.  If X was a plant that was unknown in Europe, it could be obtained by trade, like cloves, pepper, and other spices already were.
  
  

  Quote:A sensible dictator would surely just read a sentence in his mind and then slowly orate the correct information in his local language one word at a time, instead of slowly transliterating into an incorrect mess. That dictator would also be hearing himself incorrectly say "red male chicken, flavor sweet  slightly warm, main, woman person burst inside drip", and would surely say to the VMS author "hey, you know this makes no sense writing it this way, right? I can just tell you what it says"

  Sure, a translation into understandable English would have to insert articles, prepositions, and copulas everywhere, and replace compounds of N syllables by phrases with M words all the time, and reverse the order of words, etc.
  
  However, a meaningful translation into any other current Chinese language, and maybe even into non-Chinese languages like Vietnamese or Burmese, would be pretty much syllable-by-syllable (in spite of @rickforto's protests to the contrary).   
  
  Chinese languages generally do not have articles and rarely if ever use prepositions and copulas.  Compounds are usually translated just syllable by syllable.   For instance, I asked the lalamos whether any Chinese language had a specific word for "rooster", and they said no, all of them would translate 丹雄鸡 as three syllables meaning "red", "male" and "chicken".  Ditto for 鸡子 = "chicken egg".  Do you know otherwise? 
  
  Surely there will be exceptions (see the "amenorrhea" case above).  But the gap size matches strongly indicate that the mapping hanzi -> Voynichese tokens is roughly one-to-one, and the mapping hanzi -> EVA is fairly close to one-to-five. 
   
  

  Quote:For all we know, the VMS author was the leading world expert on foreign medicine and wanted to know all of the weirdest stuff the most.

  
  That is possible, but if the dictation happened in East Asia I think it is far more likely that he (like Marco Polo) was a merchant by profession, who happened to have a good enough education.  That would have been enough for him to recognize the value that the information in those Chinese books would have to European physicians. 
  
  

  Quote:I would wager that if the tables were turned, and the matches were only good when including the full text, you would be here justifying exactly why he would want to copy it all.

  No need to wager.  I concluded that those parts were systematically omitted because otherwise the matches of the 主 to daiin left them hanging out at both ends of the recipes.  
  
  

  Quote:Honestly, the far more upfront way of doing this would be to drop the theories / justifications for the removal process entirely and simply say that the SPS matches a heavily altered and trimmed SBJ text. I would more readily accept "I have no idea why the SBJ would have been heavily altered, but the SPS matches it" than hypotheticals on what someone chose 600 years ago.

  Yes, definitely.  
  
  As I tried to explain in my last reply to @rickforto, the Dictation Scenario is not a part or a prerequisite of the SPS=SBJ claim, nor of the Chinese Origin theory.  It is only my answer to those who would otherwise say that it was just impossible for an European manuscript to be written in some East Asian language, or to be a transcription of a Chinese book. 
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Amphigorist > 09-10-2026, 08:05 PM

  (09-10-2026, 07:08 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No need to wager.  I concluded that those parts were systematically omitted because otherwise the matches of the 主 to daiin left them hanging out at both ends of the recipes.  

  
  I think the concern is that removing the flavor/temperature and provenance text, the structure of the SBJ becomes a lot more generic. With them in place, the text would have an easily discernible structure that the SPS doesn't have. Without them, it looks a lot like any list of discrete entries, with a rare or unique starting word and then a body of more common words. 
  
  Being able to remove distinctive  structural elements of the text is a degree of freedom allowed to the one trying to make a match, even of those cuts are plausibly justifiable.

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 11:05 AM

  (09-10-2026, 08:05 PM)Amphigorist Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think the concern is that removing the flavor/temperature and provenance text, the structure of the SBJ becomes a lot more generic. With them in place, the text would have an easily discernible structure that the SPS doesn't have. Without them, it looks a lot like any list of discrete entries, with a rare or unique starting word and then a body of more common words.  Being able to remove distinctive  structural elements of the text is a degree of freedom allowed to the one trying to make a match, even of those cuts are plausibly justifiable.

  
  Well, the VMS text is what it is.  Whatever the Author did, we can solve the puzzle only if we correctly infer or guess what he did, and act accordingly.
  
  I think that one of the reasons why 100+ years of Voynichoscopy produced no results was the mistaken conclusion that the language was "European", because of the clearly European materials and illustration styles.  But an even stronger reason was the conviction (indirectly based on the previous one) that the text was encrypted.   
  
  From that second conviction followed the tacit assumptions that (1) the text had a simple history: there was a plaintext, the Author carefully applied an encryption algorithm to it, and the result is what we see; and (2) the puzzle has a neat and simple solution: find the encryption algorithm, apply it in reverse, and that is it.
  
  But in fact the VMS was the result of an unusual, complicated, and messy process, and then was modified several times by complicated steps, and accumulated many errors and distortions along the way.  It seems that people stil refuse to admit this, even just as a possibility.
  
  It was only recently that people began to accept the idea that the Author did not create the VMS directly "brain to vellum", and instead there was a draft that was copied to vellum by a somewhat incompetent Scribe who could not read the text.  But it seems that most people still assume that the color paints are original, that the month names and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were written at the same time as the rest of the text, and there were no changes or correction after that.  
  
  Yet I see clear evidence that most of the text and large parts of the drawings were carefully retraced at some point, decades or centuries after the original scribing, because the original ink had faded to the point of being invisible; and then retouched again here and there, with much less care, by another owner.  And then the color paints were applied by yet another owner.  With more errors added at each of these steps.
  
  And, because of the SPS=SBJ find, I believe that the draft itself was created by a very messy process of phonetic transcription from a Chinese book, by an Author who had only an imperfect understanding of it, and then copied by him at least once before being given to the Scribe.
  
  Thus I am convinced that, even if my evidence for SPS=SBJ turns out to be a pile of incredible random coincidences, the solution to this puzzle will not be neat and simple, like cracking a typical cryptogram.  It will be more like deciphering a lost language like Etruscan or Minoan form a bunch of damaged inscriptions or fragmented clay tablets.  It will be a sequence of small partial decipherment steps, stretching over decades or centuries...
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > Yesterday, 01:25 PM

  (09-10-2026, 07:08 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, someone who lived for a few years in any East Asian country should have been able to recognize al lot more spoken syllables and compounds if that recipe was read aloud in the local language, even if syllable by syllable.   He surely would have understood the parts in green below, and recognized the syllables in purple even if he could not recognize the compounds they were part of:
  
  丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上者尤良
  肪主耳聋肠主遗溺肶胵裹黄皮主泄利屎白主消渴伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子主除热火疮痫痉
  可作虎魄神物鸡白蠹能肥脂生平泽

  Again, because of homophone proliferation, words in Chinese cannot be recognized atomically on a syllable-by-syllable basis. Further, frequency and use of these vary by language and register, so even if you could make this claim, it would need to be bounded to the particular language. And even if bounded to the language of the text, Classical Chinese no one by 1400 could recognize most of the syllables there because phonetic Classical Chinese served no communitive purpose.
  
  And again, the character correspondence between the unnamed language and Classical Chinese, provided it even exists, would be based on etymology, not meaning. And while there are obvious transference benefits there if you learn the characters, that is very different from claiming someone could distinguish frequent homophones by ear in a totally different language by guessing 2000 year old etymological relationships. (Not for nothing, this is the Latin Mass problem in Italy, if Italian were full to the gills with homophones.)
  
  I know you think you can just say the Dictation Scenario is totally separable from SPS=SBJ, but you must then actually separate them for that to matter. I long ago said the Dictator/Author setup to be the feasible part, recall; it is the claims about how someone would interface with the phonology that I have been "fixated" on, to use your term. When you keep bringing up that there is some way to voice the characters that results in a hearer understanding the syllables as a means to understand a Classical Chinese text, you are smuggling elements of the Dictation Scenario into your arguments for why the VMS text is the way it is, and hence SPS = SBJ. (I might also ask who has the "fixation" with this idea, because I sure would have dropped it by now if you actually had.) The first sentence in the pull quote above is a key part of your Dictation Scenario. If you are unwilling to let that go, it doesn't matter you define your terms, my objection is located on those claims. I am not being unreasonable or failing to understand your terminological framework when I continue to object to these spurious claims.

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > Today, 11:51 AM

  (Yesterday, 01:25 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And even if bounded to the language of the text, Classical Chinese no one by 1400 could recognize most of the syllables there because phonetic Classical Chinese served no communicative purpose.

  You are so hopelessly confused.
  
  Classical Chinese is not a spoken language.  It is just a written language. More precisely, it is the set of the written languages of "classic" texts -- languages that, depending on where and when the texts were written, differ to a greater or lesser extent in their lexicon (hanzis, hanzi compounds, and their meanings) and grammar (how those lexemes can be combined, and the meaning of those combinations.
  
  What you call "spoken Classical Chinese" seems to be the "modern standard Mandarin-based reading of Classical Chinese".  It is a modern convention of Mandarin-speaking scholars.  It is not how the authors of those texts would have read them aloud.  It is not how Middle Mandarin speaking scholars would have read them in 1400.  It is not how Cantonese, Vietnamese, Burmese, or Japanese scholars would read them, in any epoch. 
  
  

  Quote:Again, because of homophone proliferation

  
  Homophones are indeed a problem when transcribing a written text in any language (Chinese or not) into any script (phonetic or not) from dictation.  
  
  However, it is a minor problem for the Dictation Scenario.  First, because they are rather rare.  How many of the hanzi in the Rooster recipe could have been confused with homophones by the Author, if they were read in (say) modern Mandarin?  (Please assume a Dictator with a functioning brain, who was somewhat aware of the Author's fluency in the local language.)
  
  Second, potential homophones can usually be disambiguated by context.  The homophones "to", "too", and "two" are very common words in English, but they get hardly confused in spoken speech (or dictation) because each occurs in a largely distinct grammatical context.  Same for "write" and "right", "read" (past tense) and "red", etc.
  
  The homophone problem is insignificant compared to the other difficulties that the Author faced, such as the ambiguous and unfamiliar grammar, the medical terms and jargon, the unknown or obscure remedies ("qucao herb", "hard limonite",  "flying squirrel" etc).  
  
  But all those problems do not imply that the Dictation Scenario could not have happened.  It would be like arguing that Geber's alchemical texts could not possibly have ever been translated into Latin, because the alleged translators were not alchemists and would not have understood his alchemical terms or recognized the substances he mentioned.
  
  

  Quote:words in Chinese cannot be recognized atomically on a syllable-by-syllable basis.

  
  They can be recognized about just as easily (or not) as the Chinese words can be recognized in the hanzi text without punctuation.  If the local language were modern Mandarin, an Author moderately fluent in it would have recognized "jī zǐ" as the word for "egg" about just a easily as the Dictator recognized 鸡子.  
  
  Maybe you are thinking of a mechanical reading with monotone intonation and speed?  Again, please assume a Dictator with a functioning brain...
  
  

  Quote:And again, the character correspondence between the unnamed language and Classical Chinese, provided it even exists, would be based on etymology, not meaning.

  
  That may be perhaps what you would do.   Why on Earth and Heavens would the Dictator do that?
  
  

  Quote:Not for nothing, this is the Latin Mass problem in Italy, if Italian were full to the gills with homophones.

  
  What?
  
  

  Quote:When you keep bringing up that there is some way to voice the characters that results in a hearer understanding the syllables as a means to understand a Classical Chinese text, you are smuggling elements of the Dictation Scenario into your arguments for why the VMS text is the way it is, and hence SPS = SBJ.

  
  Again, the SPS=SBJ claim states that there is a mapping from the hanzi of the SBJ (as quoted in the ZHB) to the voynichese of the SPS, that appears to be mostly one-to-one for words and one-to-five for EVA characters.  Modulo some spelling variations and systematic omissions of specific fields and omission of a few non-medical comments.  The evidence for it is mainly the positional matches of certain crib pairs.  The SPS=SBJ claim does not specify how the transcription was created or how the hanzi or the Voynichese should be pronounced.  The evidence does not depend on either.
  
  Again, the Dictation Scenario is not part of either the COT or the SPS=SBJ claim.  It is just my answer to those who reject any proposal of a East Asian language or Chinese souce as being impossible, for alleged historical reasons of because the manuscript looks totally European.  
  
  That scenario may well be wrong; maybe the VMS was created in a completely different way.  Maybe even by an Author who coud read the hanzi.  And maybe Voynichese is not a phonetic rendering of an Eash Asian language, but a codebook cipher, or monosyllabic Bavarian.  But I think that scenario is the most likely one, because, among other things, it would explain some statistical peculiarities of Voynichese, and the pattern of spelling variations that I see when matching SBJ recipes to SPS parags.

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 10 hours ago

  (Yesterday, 01:25 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

  
  The following has nothing to do with the COT, the SPS=SBJ claim, or the Dictation scenario, but is about a misconception that seems necessary to clearup:
  
  Surely some Chinese scholars will claim that their parsing and interpretation of classical texts never changed, in spite of pronunciation changes; so that what they think that the Analects or the Dao mean is precisely what Confucius and Lao Tse meant.   But that is religious (or almost-religious) dogma, not fact.
  
  That may be sort of somewhat true for texts that have been continuously read and commented for the last N centuries.  The way modern scholars interpret them now is probably very close to how scholars did N centuries ago.
  
  But for texts that were hardly read and commented, including newly discovered old texts, the modern parsing and interpretation may be way off from what the authors intended.  And ditto for texts that do not have such a continuous trail of scholarly comments extending all the way back to their creation.  The modern parsing will often be incorrect, and the modern interpretation of words and grammatical constructs will often be wrong.
  
  There are plenty of examples of incorrect parsing and interpretation in the "scholarly consensus reading" of ancient Western texts.  Even of the very first word of Genesis, it seems. 
  
  Even in that Rooster recipe, it seems that Chinese medical scholars themselves are somewhat uncertain about how to parse the phrase 鸡白蠹, and they do not seem to know its meaning.  
  
  "Wait, what did you just say -- "he ate a camel and a turtle"??  Is that how you read my 其食駱駝龜 in that future where you said you are from?  No, no, no!  I meant "he was eating a camel's hump"!  See, "turtle" is how people here in in the 鳥不拉屎的地方 Province call the hump of a camel.  And "camel's hump" is the name of a steamed bun with egg and dates filling.  Don't you eat them any more?"
  
  All the best, --stolfi
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