The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What the Author did, copying hundreds of pages, in an imperfect manner, with uncertain hope of having it translated later, to me sounds like a really bad plan. Maybe it's possible to invent the circumstances under which this would be the only option.

I think that, in the scenario I described, it was indeed his only option.   And people sometimes do make and carry out stupid plans.

Note again that anyone who spent a few years in the place would learn the spoken language to some extent.  See Marco Polo, Gaspar da Gama, and all other merchants of that time who traveled to distant lands whose languages no one had heard in Europe.   So he probably understood the text that the Reader was dictating more than I understand Latin, or spoken French.  His knowledge was good enough that the felt confident in inventing his own script for the language -- but surely not enough to translate medical or astronomical treatises into Latin. 

there is no way one could perfectly copy a barely known language by ear

 

Indeed. If the "Chinese" theory is correct in any form, that will be another big obstacle to decipherment: on top of the changes that the language suffered in the last 600 years, there will be an unknown amount of transcription errors -- when the Reader mistakenly read 候 as "shì" and the Author heard "chí" but wrote chaiin instead of chain. 

without even attempting to replicate some of the original script

  

That would have been completely useless.  It would not help him figure the 
parts that he did not understand.

or adding some notes

Again, it would be impractical to write such notes while taking the dictation.  He may have written some notes later, maybe even compiled a short dictionary -- but the notes surely would be very incomplete and messy, and would be written separately on paper.  

even if the herbal part is a "hoax", it's still a hundred pages left?

I don't think that the text of the Herbal section is a hoax.  My guess is that the Author took dictation of a book that became the Pharma section, for which he managed to copy the figures of plant parts.   Then later he took dictation of another book that was similar to a herbal, but he did not have the time to copy all figures in full.  Or maybe the original did not have any figures, only text.  So back home, when "vellifying" the latter book, he had the Scribe make up the full plant figures -- by copying some bits from Pharma and maybe a few partial sketches by the Author, but inventing most of the rest.

If there were any [unambiguoulsy Chinese] fruits, by the very definition of "unambiguously" we would have known by now   A lot of botanists checked the MS, I'm not sure how many non-disputed plants are there, certainly not one that would be called "unambiguously Oriental/non-European", otherwise this would be big news.

But none that have been identified as "unambiguously non-Oriental" either.  

Again, it seems to be a consensus that the drawings of the Herbal section are partly made up, and when looking at any plant we do not know which details, if any, are reasonably accurate.  In my version of the "Chinese theory", even the non-fake details are copies of copies of drawings from some copy of a local book.  Compare the drawings of known plants on Medieval herbals with their photos or professional drawings, to see how bad that situation is.  And the Scribe obviously was not a botanical artist, and I bet that the Author was even less good at that.  So it is no wonder that botanists have failed to identify any of the plants (except one or two, which unfortunately grow natively on all continents).

If the goal of the Author was spreading/recording knowledge, I think one of the things she or he would be keen on doing was reproducing some of the images as accurately as possible.

Again, I don't think that the Author's goal was to spread knowledge widely.  At best, he may have hoped to eventually write a translation that he could sell or gift to a scholar back home.  A plan which apparently was downgraded to making a nice vellum copy of the transcription itself, possibly with the encoding of sounds and tones explained verbally (how else?) to the recipient, and a small dictionary of the words he knew on a separate document.

How likely is it that The Author witnessed the Reader read hundreds of pages from a book, but failed to notice which way the book was normally held?

Many possibilities:

• It may have been the first book that he transcribed, and he tried to copy the title before the dictation started; and he had not yet learned that Chinese books are bound on the right.
  
• The two were seated in such a way that the Author could not see how the Reader oriented the book.
  
• Or maybe he could see, but did not pay attention.
  
• Maybe he knew about the binding, but when he took the book he unconsciously turned it so that the binding was on the left, as he used to do with European books.
  
• Or maybe he turned it because the unconsciously assumed that the red big signs, being the title, should be at the top left of the page, rather than at bottom right.
  

, nor got any hint from the images

Presumably there were no images on that page, or he would have copied them.

And then [why] put these symbols as if they were paragraph initials in the transcription

• Maybe he was not sure whether those symbols were a single title or two parag capitals.
  
• Maybe in the draft he wrote them vertically on the left margin, and then wrote the text left-aligned on a single vertical line to the left of them, or in a separate sheet of paper.  But the Scribe mistook them for ornate capitals, and formatted the text accordingly, with indentations.
  

By the way, if those symbols were indeed red and at the lower right corner in the "Chinese" original, they possibly were not the title, but the seal stamp(s) of the original author or owner(s) of the book.

All the best, --jorge