Re: Matteo Ricci's romanization system

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Steve Marshall:] I have yet to find any examples of what
    > Ricci's romanisation system looked like.

The system was apparently developed by Ricci for his Portuguese-Chinese
dictionary (MS. Arquivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Jap.Sin, I, 198)
Last I heard, W. South Coblin was preparing a modern edition.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~caps/AboutCaps/faculty/SouthCoblin.htm

Here is another book about it, by Portuguese scholar Joseph Abraham Levi 
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/8945/ricci.html

    > What I was wondering is whether there has been any further ideas on
    > this, or whether anyone has a sample of the actual script that was
    > developed by Ricci and Trigault.

Samples from Ricci's dictionary, in Ricci's own handwriting (Roman and
Chinese) are reproduced on the dust cover of Jonathan Spence's book
"The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci".  (In my mind, the system was developed
by Ricci and Ruggieri, not Ricci and Trigault; but I may be mistaken.)
Judging from that sample, the system looks pretty much liie modern pinyin, except
for an extra diacritic and sligtly different sets of consonants and finals.

    > A little whole ago I read about the very intriguing suggestion
    > that the Voynich script may have some connection to the "pinyin"
    > system of romanisation of Chinese developed by Matteo Ricci. I
    > forget where I saw this hint, perhaps Jorge Stolfi's site?
    
Yes, for a while I thought that the VMS could have been written by
someone who got to China with the first Portuguese/Spanish navigators.
The main justification for looking to China was that the VMS "words"
looked like isolated (but somewhat complex) syllables, and quite
unlike the polisyllabic words of European languages.

In one possible scenario, the author would be a missionary to East
Asia who was still struggling to learn the language, but despaired of
learning the Chinese writing system; so he invented a new script for
it. The author would then have taken dictation from a native
informant, perhaps not with full understanding. (Or he may have taught
the script to a native assistant and asked him to transcribe some
books.)

Our man would probably have tought that his script would be readily
accepted by the natives, being so obviously superior to their
ideographic writing. But after a year or two he would have realized
that, on one hand, learning the Chinese script was not as difficult as
it seemed, and was essential if he wanted to get any respect among the
educated classes; and, on the other hand, his alphabetic system was
less efficient than theirs, would not work across dialects,
and had absolutely zero chance of ever being adopted by them.

I still don't see anything that is definitely wrong in this scenario.
The dates are a bit tight but still quite possible: the VMS could have
been written in Macao somewhere between 1513 (first landing in China)
and about 1583 (by which time the Jesuits were using the Chinese
script routinely). The Jesuits were required to send yearly reports to
their superiors back home, so the book could easily have traveled to
Rome (and from there to Prague) in a few months, in time to be sold to
Rudolf.

The scenario would also fit the mindset of the early missionaries,
such as Ricci. In fact, I first read of him as the inventor of the first
alphabetic writing for Chinese - *ding*! On top of that, he was born
in Northern Italy - *ding* and the son of a pharmacist - *ding*!

Unfortunately, Ricci's personality did not quite square with the style
of the VMS. For one thing, one does not expect that a priest, living
in a crowded mission, would dare to draw all those naked ladies to
illustrate local medical theories, when the natives themselves did not
use such attention-grabbing devices. Moreover, Ricci was educated in
geometry (he later translated Euclid into Chinese) and would certainly
have known how to divide a circle into 12 equal parts --- which the
VMS author apparently didn't. Finally, the alphabetic system which the
book referred to was based on Roman letters, and there is no mention
of him having tried anything more bizarre before that. Since he
arrived in China in 1582, probably had already switched to the Roman-based
system by 1584, and was a very busy man, he probably had no
time to write the VMS.

It is also possible that the VMS author was any of several other
missionaries, from the Jesus Society and other orders, who preceded
Ricci in Macao by several decades --- starting around 1558 --- and
thus had enough time to write the VMS.

One such candidate is Michele Ruggieri, a Jesuit who visited Macao in
1580 and settled there by 1581, one year before Ricci.  The two worked
closely on Chinese linguistics for a few years, but Ruggieri retired
and went back to Rome in 1588. He could have invented the Voynichese
script and written the VMS before Ricci's arrival, and could have
taken the book to Rome with his belongings --- except, of course, for
all those naked ladies...

There are endless other variants, e.g. an origin in Vietnam or Myanmar;
Portuguese contacts start around 1516, but details are hard to come by. 
(While in China the Portuguese were not allowed to settle
between 1517 and 1557, those other places had no such restrictions,
so there the "window of opportunity" is some 60-70 years wide.)

Or, instead of a missionary, the author could be a ship's doctor, or an
educated nobleman. (The latter routinely joined voyages to the Indies,
seeking wealth and prestige in the Court.  Camões, the author of the 
Portuguese's national epic "The Lusiads", was one of them.)

Unfortunately, some statistical coincidences I have found recently in the
VMS make it look more like a codebook-type cipher than a phonetic
transcription.  Sigh...

All the best,

--stolfi