The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In general, one can safely assume that any 15th century rendition of an East Asian language would have to be either a rendition of sounds [...] Indication of tones in writing is not at all something that was usually done, at least before modern romanisations.

Well, if the Chinese theory is correct, the VMS may become notable as the first example of a phonetic transcription of a tonal language...

Transcriptions of tonal languages that omit tones are usually limited to person and place names, or isolated words like "feng shui" and "kung fu".  It would be totally pointless to transcribe whole sentences that way.

The Author surely knew the language well enough to devise a script for it.  He must have been well aware of the "shi shi shi" problem.  Thus his script had to encode the tones too.  

BTW, the modern Pinyin script for Mandarin, using diacritics for the tones, was devised by Jesuit Matteo Ricci around 1580, and used in his Mandarin-Latin dictionary published in Rome.   His story may be interesting as an example of interaction and culture exchanges between European travelers and local scholars.

BTW too, I recall finding references to a Vietnamese-Latin dictionary that would have been written by Portuguese missionaries around 1510-1520, thus before Ricci's.   Since Vietnamese is (and presumably was already) a tonal language, their dictionary must have used some encoding of the tones too.  Unfortunately I could not find anything else about that story.

An alphabetic writing system for Thai arose in the 15th century, according to tradition. This only indicated tones in specific cases.

That system worked because it was used by native speakers of the language, who could infer the tone from context.  Just as the Italian script does not mark the stressed syllable, and only rarely identifies the two sounds "o" and the two sounds of "e"; which is a big problem for non-native learners.  Or just as the Hebrew script does not write short vowels. 

But if the Author spoke the language imperfectly, as expected of someone who lived in the place for only a few years, he would need to record the tone for almost all words.