Re: Chinese (Doubled words)

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Philp Neal:] I know that there was contact between Europe and
    > South East Asia in the relevant period. But most of the
    > languages of Chinese type already had their own scripts, and
    > Tibetan, Burmese, Thai and Khmer had alphabets in the Indian
    > tradition. I don't see why explorers or missionaries would
    > devise a totally new script and use it to write secular
    > material. If they wanted to communicate with Asians, they would
    > have adopted an Asian script, and if they wanted to keep
    > something secret they would not have used an Asian language.
    > Supporters of the Chinese theory have to tell us who was
    > supposed to read the manuscript.

You have two questions here: (1) "why not use the native scripts", and
(2) "why not use a script based on the Roman alphabet". 

The answers obviously depend on who wrote the manuscript, and why.
The author could be either an European, or a native.  
In this message I will explore the first alternative only.

An European author could be either a missionary or an educated
explorer. In either case, the VMS is most easily explained as a record
of native lore that was dictated to the author by a native, possibly
from native books. Dictation was used because our author could neither
read nor write the native script himself, and had no hope or intention
of mastering it. (He may or may not have understood what he was
writing.)

In the case of a missionary, we don't need to speculate on the 
"why"s: it suffices to note that there *were* indeed many instances
of missionaries inventing new scripts for languages that already had
their own scripts. While most of those new scripts used the Roman
alphabet, with diacritics when needed, in some cases the inventor
thought that it was cool to redesign the entire symbol set.

Missionary-invented scripts were meant to serve two purposes. First,
to make the spoken language easier to learn by new missionaries; in
particular, to allow the production of printed grammars, dictionaries,
and practice texts. Second, to make Western written materials
(especially catechisms and other religious literature) more accesible
to the converted natives.

Native scripts were often perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be
inadequate for such purposes, because they were all fairly complex and
often required more effort to learn than the language itself. Note
that that by 1500 most countries in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea,
Vietnam) used scripts based on Chinese characters, which were
difficult enough for Chinese, and nightmarish for the other languages.(**)
Even the Hindu-based scripts (like those of Burma, Laos, Cambodia,
Thailand, Tibet) had developed very complicated and unsystematic
spelling rules, because of the need to record tones and sounds not
present in Hindu languages.

Another reason for inventing a new script would be plain cultural
chauvinism. Even today Westerners tend to assume without proof that
alphabetic scripts are "smarter" than syllabic or logographic ones;
and a missionary usually assumes that he is there to teach his
"superior culture" to the "ignorant natives", not the other way
around.  

Finally, there may have been a conscious or unconscious "marketing"
reason. If the missionaries tried to use the native script, they would
be seen as semi-literate and hence culturally inferior to the native
scholars. If they instead promoted a "new, better" script, the
positions would be reversed.

Cultural chauvinism didn't prevent the missionaries, however, from
sending back to Rome copies and translations of native books, and
illustrated reports on native culture. European libraries today still
keep thousands of manuscripts, both native and missionary-written,
that were sent from East Asia during the 1500's and early 1600's. In
my view, that "documentary urge" would have been enough motivation for
a missionary to write the VMS in the manner described above.
(After all, we only need to explain how *one* missionary could have
decided to do such thing.)

I see two problems with this "missionary" theory, though. 

First problem: a respectable European missionary would hardly draw all
those naked nymphs, even if he were merely copying the illustrations
from a native book. To explain them, we need to assume either a rather
peculiar personality working in rather unusual circumstances; or that
the Beinecke book is second-generation copy, made by a lay scribe who,
after doing Aries, decided that naked nymphs were easier to draw (and
sell) than the dressed ones drawn by the missionary.

Second problem: as far as I know, the scripts developed at that time
by missionaries in SE Asia --- who were all more or less in contact
with each other --- generally followed the Roman-plus-diacritics
model, probably because it was more "friendly" not only to Western
novices but also to Western printers. The examples of missionaries
inventing new alphabets/sillabaries are either much earlier than the
15th-16th century (Cyrillic, Armenian) or much later (Cree, Inukitut,
Cherokee, Miao(*)). To get around this problem, we would have to
assume that the Voynichese script is an early or "eccentric" attempt,
which was soon abandoned for a Roman-based solution. Again, note that
the VMS may be a copy of a much earlier original.

Apart from missionaries, there were many other European travelers who
had both the skill and the occasion to produce something like the VMS.
Marco Polo is only one out of hundreds of European explorers who
visited SE Asia before 1600 and lived there long enough to learn the
local language. Many of those were well-educated gentlemen, aware that
there was a good market in Europe for "scientific" information from
faraway lands, especially herbal and medical knowledge -- the VMS
subjects.

Those travelers would have had no problems with naked ladies; on the
other hand, their motivation to invent a new script would have been
smaller. Still, I can imagine a doctor-explorer, or a trader in
medicinal herbs, who managed to learn the spoken language but not the
written one, producing the VMS in order to take home a record of the
local medical knowledge, in a form that *he* could read later. This
was, by the way, the theory of Georg Baresch, the first confirmed
owner and student of the manuscript.

Such an author could have used a Roman-plus-diacritics script, but
that may have been too inefficient for dictation. (Languages from SE
Asia generally have more than 20 consonants and more than 5 vowels,
plus multiple tones. The Roman-based Vietnamese script, for example,
may use 3-4 diacritics on the same syllable, often 2 on the same
letter. Althoug we still don't know the "stroke efficiency" of the
Voynichese script, its design apparently was meant to optimize that
factor. On the other hand, our doctor-traveler presumably had no plans
to print the untranslated manuscript, nor to teach the script to other
Europeans; so the two main advantages of a Roman-based script did not
apply to him. That is to say, Voynichese would have been essentially a
personal stenographic system. 

The other major alternative -- a native author -- is best left for
another message.

All the best,

--stolfi

----------------------------------- 

(*) Dan Moonhawk Alford claims that the North American native scripts
were not invented by the missionaries, but had long been used by the
natives themselves. Even if that claim is true, the missionaries at
least adopted those scripts in preference to Roman-based ones, and
tried to turn them from an elite/secret script into an universal one.
Thus the point stands: a western missionary author would not
necessarily use a Roman-based script.

Furthermore, the Miao alphabet seems to be a genuine missionary
invention.

(**) St. Francis Xavier once joked that Japanese script must have been
designed by the Devil for the purpose of preventing the
Christianization of the land. It reminds me of a joke by another,
priest, centuries earlier: that the Basques were the only people
without sin, because the Devil himself had not been able to learn
their language