The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

As you will see there, daiin (the most common word in the SPS) corresponds quite closely to the Chinese character 主 zhǔ (the most common character in the SBJ).  Strictly speaking that character has the general sense of "main" or "mainly", but seems to occur almost always in the compound 主治 zhǔ zhì which can be translated as "indications:", or "the main uses are" or "is mainly used for".  The SBJ is a list of ~360 drugs and their uses; 主治 is a "key" in the rather uniform formula of the SBJ entries, that introduces the list of diseases.

Really interesting Jorge. 

Out of interest, are there any other sections/recipes that match daiin as well as that one? 

And do you have any suspicions for how the VMS text would have been created if this was the case? I can imagine a european attempting to transcribe chinese characters in a way that made sense to them, like something like below. (I do like how the 3 lines somewhat match..)