The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

By chance it has the same patterns as Chinese for "use" word in one paragraph but different patterns for other words.

"Use" is the only word that is repeated more than a few times in that recipe.  Some characters occur 2-3 times, but are parts of compounds with very different meanings, thus their readings in another language -- even in another Chinese "dialect" -- may have no sound in common.

The phrase 肶胵裹黄皮= "the yellow lining of the gizzard" is read in modern Mandarin as "pí chī guǒ huáng pí", with the same "pí" sound twice.  But the characters 肶 and 皮 are homophones -- unrelated words that happen to have the same sound in Mandarin, like "two" and "too" in English.  But in modern Cantonese (the dialect of Shanghai and Hong Kong), those same five characters are read as "bei2 ci3 gwo2 wong4 pei2".  Note that 肶 and 皮 now have different sounds.

The character 子 zǐ, which has the general meaning of "child", occurs twice in that recipe; but once as part of the compound 女子 nǚ zǐ = "woman" and once as part of 鸡子 jī zǐ = "eggs" (literally "bird children").  According to Google translate, in  Cantonese the first one would be replaced by 女人 neoi5 jan2 (where 人 generally means "person"), while the second would still be written with the same characters (only in the "traditional" style 雞子) and pronounced "gai1 zi2".  So the "zǐ" would not be repeated.  And in Vietnamese 女子 translates as "phụ nữ" while 鸡子 is "trứng"..

The failure for other repeated characters probably have the same explanation.  However there is a repetition of 寒 hán = "cold" in 伤寒寒热 shāng hán hán rè = "typhoid fever with alternating chills and fever" whose position approximately matches ytaiin.otair in the SPS text; and I have already noted that y and o seem to be equivalent (by nature or by error) and same for in and r...

All the best, --stolfi

PS.  And you, Rafal, of all people here, should understand these points better.   How did you discover the meaning of all those symbols in the Rohonc codex? Did you categorically determine the translation of all of them? Can you describe the language's grammar?