The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

and we are talking about spoken languages, not written

Well, in my theory the text was taken from books. The Author got someone to read each book aloud while he wrote down the sounds in his ad-hoc phonetic alphabet.  

In that scenario, the Dictator would have to be literate.  Thus he probably read the book in Mandarin, rather than in the local dialect.  (While the "dialects" today have very similar syntax to Mandarin, the differences -- especially at the time -- may have made reading in the local dialect more difficult.)

If the "old Chinese dialect" possibility is not bad enough, it is possible that the Dictator did not know the Chinese characters for all those plants and diseases.  Rather than stop an tell the Author "sorry, but here there is a character that I don't know", the Dictator may have made up a bogus reading on the spot, aware that the "gringo" would be unable to tell...

All the best, --stolfi