The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[countingtls]

There are small oddities, perfectly explainable as mistakes, spelling variants, abbreviations, etc. and then there are massive inconsistencies, much less explainable: the big differences between Currier "languages" and all the many "dialects" on a smaller scale.

One of the interesting "quirks" of a BenCao book in the time period around the 12th to 14th century printed versions is that they were effectively like a "dictionary" of references across multiple eras, and mainly the Old Chinese with classical Chinese writing in the core, and Middle Chinese about to transition to Early Mandarin added to expand the work. The core entries would come from the oldest sources of classical Chinese and Old Chinese (before the 6th century, and the first massive rewrite/compile), while the later references attached to them by authors mainly in the 10th to 12th centuries (the second massive rewrite/recompile). They are related, but very different in their grammar and structure. And they would include dialects and aliases across many different regions in the later expansion (the earlier scripts would be more "pure" and highly "stylised" since they've been copied more times and streamlined across many editions). It is a feature of a long-lasting tradition of recording and expanding/reinterpreting the same work across hundreds of years. 

Then imagine someone who just know how to pronounce the words in just one dialect in a remotely related language family and record/translate them, and not able to properly distinguish tones as an intermediary translator/trader.