Date: Sat, 14 Dec 91 07:59:47 EST
From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)

[... refs to the prefix/suffix paradigms of D'Imperio and Currier ...]

Now those of you who have studied Chinese (I am sure there are some)
will have recognized there something very similar to the fanqie of the
traditional analysis of Chinese words. Traditional Chinese scholars
analyze the Chinese syllable into initial, final, and tone. The
initial is the initial consonant of the syllable (sometimes none), the
final is the rest. In Mandarin (by which I mean the learned variety of
the Peking dialect, used for administrative purposes), there are only
about 400 possible different syllables, and a final can only end in a
vowel or either of two consonants: "n" or "ng". Further, "ng" never
occurs as an initial, and syllable-final "n" is acoustically quite
distinct from syllable-initial "n". What am I driving at? That the
startling repetitive patterns and co-occurrence restrictions of the
Voynich language (IF it is one), are compatible with an imperfect
phonetic rendition of a language such as Chinese. I do not remember
whom I first bombarded with my pet tongue-in-cheek theory about the
Voynich manuscript. Was it Michael Barlow, or Brian Winkel, editor of
Cryptologia? Here it is: the Voynich manuscript was written in Venice
by two natives brought back by Marco Polo, probably from China
(tongue, stay firm in my cheek). They devised the alphabet after what
they had seen our writing, which they probably could not read. That
would not be an isolated incident: the Cherokee language is
traditionally written in a syllabary the symbols of which look
strangely like Roman letters. Its inventor, a Cherokee Indian by the
name of Sequoia, devised it last century. Sequoia was illiterate, but
had figured out that there was a correlation between the black
squiggles in pale faces' books and the sounds of their speech. So he
set about devising a set of squiggles for his own language, inspired
from the pale faces' squiggles, ending up not with an alphabet, but a
syllabary. And a very good job he did too, entirely adequate for
recording the sounds of Cherokee. Chinese-like languages, however, are
another story. Their sound patterns (phonology, in our jargon) are not
easily amenable to sensible alphabetical or syllabic writing. And how,
a naive native speaker, would you represent tones in a writing system
to which you have just been exposed? That, together with tone sandhi
(quite extensive in those language families) would account for the
strange repetitive, but not quite exactly repeating, patterns of the
Voynich language. Let me give you one example. In Mandarin, the word
for "Miss" is made up of the same syllable twice repeated: jie3. The
"3" here just means that it is in the third tone: starting on a low
pitch, going lower, then rising sharply. However, when two third tones
occur in succession, the first becomes a second tone, rising sharply
from middle pitch. Finally, to confuse things further, the second
"jie" becomes unstressed, loses its tone, and is just uttered on a
pitch slightly lower than the end pitch of the first "jie"! Imagine
now that you were a 13th century Chinese speaker suddenly transported
to England. The notion of an alphabetic writing system would be novel
to you. You would have great difficulties finding correspondences
between the sounds of English and those of Chinese. Sitting down to
write an encyclopaedia in alphabetic writing, you would soon be
confronted with delicate decisions: "'Map' is not too difficult to
write, it sounds about like the English word 'too'. So I write it
'too'. Uh, uh, but 'earth' too, is 'too', and so is 'to spit', only
they are in different tones. Oh, well, not to worry, there can hardly
be any confusion, given the context, so I'll write them all the
same. Whenever there is a serious risk of confusion, I'll make
something up. 'Too' (earth) is third tone, down then up, so when the
need arises, I'll write it 'too-oo' or something like that, or perhaps
I shall stick a tall squiggly letter in it".

Yes, I do have my tongue in my cheek when I say that the Voynich was
written by two Chinese speakers brought to Venice by Marco Polo. To be
honest, I estimate the likelihood of it to be so small as to be negligible.
At the same time, I think it infinitely more probable than Brumbaugh's and
especially Levitov's decipherments (John Baez, you're the mathematician, so
tell us: does it mean that I believe Brumbaugh's and Levitov's
decipherments to be worth exactly, precisely zilch and not even one
googolplexeth more?)