The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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

I haven't checked, but I expect that most well-defined parags in the SPS will.  I just tried the longest entry in each file, and it worked better than I expected -- so I stopped there.

And do you have any suspicions for how the VMS text would have been created if this was the case?

My "Chinese Origin" theory is that the Author was a traveler -- probably an European, but have been an Arab, a Jew, or anything else -- who spent a few years in some East Asian country -- could have been China, but other countries like Vietnam or Burma may be even more likely.  Enough time to learn the spoken language at a passable level.   There he saw that they had many books of medicine, astronomy, etc which he felt that he must take back home.  Maybe he had promised his scholar uncle, maybe he thought that they could be sold at a good price, who knows.

But he could not take the books themselves, nor copy them himself, because he had not learned the written language and had no hope of learning it.  Especially since those "technical" books would probably be written in Chinese characters, even though they may be pronounced in the local language.

So he devised a phonetic alphabet for the language, and got a local scholar or doctor to read the books aloud, while he wrote it down.  On paper, almost certainly; with no decorative pictures (jars, nymphs, etc), at most with simple sketches of roots and leaves, like those in Pharma.  And in a messy format, with erasures, "this goes there" etc, as in any draft.  He probably could not understand much of them himself, but hoped that he could do that back home, using what he knew of the spoken language and maybe some glossaries that he made by the side.

Eventually the Author got back to Europe -- probably north of the Alps -- and there he recruited a scribe to make a clean copy of his notes on vellum.  But he was not rich, so he had to use "factory reject" grade vellum and a Scribe who could hold a pen but not much beyond that.  And he gave this Scribe a bunch of illustrated books, from his library or borrowed from somewhere, to use as "inspiration" for the decorative elements.  He trained the Scribe on the alphabet, but the Scribe did not understand the language -- and apparently did not understand the illustrations that he was copying, either.

As a result, I expect that the text will have a large fraction of errors.  Perhaps 15 or 20%  of the words may be wrong -- mis-spoken by the Dictator, mis-heard by the Author, garbled on his draft, mis-read or jumbled by the Scribe, mis-BEEEPed, mis-read or mis-typed by the modern transcriber...

But those errors shouldnot be a big obstacle to decipherment -- by someone who knows the language.  Which I don't...

Al the best, --stolfi