The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

You'll agree with me that leading with "this paper proves the Starred paragraph section is the SBJ" when your "proof" is a poorly fitted positional analysis is borderline delusional. I have nothing against the Chinese theory, however I have to reiterate that to make certain claims one needs strong evidence. If the paper had only suggested that daiin COULD be zhu then ok, but it doesn't, it takes it much further.

The whole Chinese theory argument appears preposterous to me, but it still can be a learning opportunity and a good thought experiment on how decoding a phonetic transcription of a monosyllabic language may play out.

It appears to me that after dealing with the Chinese theory for a while, Jorge_Stolfi has nearly 100% probability of the Chinese theory being correct, likely from many small pieces of evidence, because I haven't seen a smoking gun yet. I can't know if this probability is justified, my own probability of the eastern origin is nearly zero. 

Unfortunately, most arguments are presented from ~100% Chinese point of view and are not designed to work to "prove it's Chinese", but to work under "we know it's Chinese, explain why it's like this".

On the second point, then it follows that if this isn't literally chinese, then daiin isn't literally zhu or zhu zhi, and the SBS isn't the SBJ. Language is important, if one makes an announcement of this magnitude (possibly THE biggest breakthrough in cracking the VM if this is correct) then I am expecting a lot more than "it could be this, but also that", because this is also what the turkish, the irish and a bunch of other theories do.

Even if the language is not literal Chinese, it might be still possible to match word patterns. A very good example of how these patterns are almost preserved is in the Google translation that is used in the paper. Each 主 roughly corresponds to one "use" in the English translation, with one extra "use" thrown in by Google translate to make the wording smoother in English.