Stroke encoding?

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Claus Anders:] A second thought: what if the VMS characters
    > where stroke information, i.e. you apply the appropiate strokes
    > from left to right resulting in a chinese character (maybe a
    > dumb thought).

As others have noted, the idea is sensible enough to have been
proposed as an input method for chinese. (According to Dr. Net, there
are about 26 basic stroke shapes, and characters may have from 1 to 20
or more strokes.) In fact the Kanji input methods which are most
popular today in China and Japan seem to be elaborations on this idea.

The theory could explain why some characters repeat two or three
times: they would denote multiple parallel strokes, such as 
in "one" "two", "three", "step", etc. 

One major problem with that idea is motivation. There were no
keyboards in the 1500s, so what would be the advantage of mapping a
chinese character to a random-looking sequence of letters? That would
perhaps make the script seem less intimidating to western students,
but it would not help them much: they would still have to memorize the
spelling of several thousand words, which would be completely
unrelated to their sounds. Not to mention the fact that the encoding
of a character would probably require twice as many strokes, and use
up three times as much paper area than the character itself.

Moreover, knowing the strokes and their order is not enough: in order
to recover the character mechanically and unambiguously, one would
also need to know the relative positions and sizes of the strokes,
which would have required rather long encodings. (The only difference
between the characters for "tu3" "land" and "shi4" "soldier" is the
relative length of the two horizontal strokes). The Voynichese words
don't seem to be long enough to carry that information explicitly.
Therefore, if your guess were true, Voynichese would be just a
mnemonic device, usable only by someone who already knew the Chinese
characters.

Still, this argument is not conclusive. Perhaps the author had the
printing press in mind, and designed the system so as to allow a
completely untrained person to transcribe a Chinese book into a format
that could be printed with moveable type, without having to hire a
native reader. (In other words, he may have done for Chinese precisely
what Jacques did with for his script; and then Frogguy alphabet would
be a *two-level* stroke-based encoding of Chinese! Now *that* is an
amusing thought...)

There is another big problem with this theory, though. I don't see how it
would give rise to the observed word structure -- which, on the other
hand, is very much like the phonetic structure of Chinese syllables.

All the best,

--stolfi