The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I think you did [hunt for books that fitted the statistics of the SPS].  ... Probably you were still dissatisfied with the match and you had to design custom paragraph breaks in SPS to make the data fit better.

So now you are accusing me of lying and cheating?  That desperate?

Why would I do that?  The claim "SPS≈SBJ" is quite specific: "The SPS is a close almost word-for-word version of the SBJ, and the meaning of daiin is something like 'uses'".  Unlike other theories, including the general Chinese Origin theory, that claim is easily falsifiable.  If turns out to be false, I will look like a fool.  If I did not feel like I had solid evidence, lying and cheating would only make this outcome more likely, and worse.

you were looking for a text that would fit the profile of SPS - a large number (preferably ~300) of relatively short paragraphs. You didn't consider huge 1000 page long tomes, you didn't consider short treatises either, because these wouldn't match quite obviously. So you ran a pre filter that removed most books with wildly different statistics from consideration.

Again, even today, the only Chinese book for which I have any statistics at all is the SBJ; and the only statistic I knew, before I got hold of the digital version, was the number of paragraphs -- because that was always stated in the articles that mentioned it.  I did not know the min, max, or average size of the parags. Much less the parag size histogram, or that 主 was its most common character, or how many times 主 occurred in its longest recipe and how many times daiin occurred in the longest SPS parag, and how many words/characters there were between those occurrences.

So, no, I did not hunt for a Chinese text that matched the statistics of SPS.  Again, I first suspected that the SPS may be a version of the SBJ because of the parag count and because the SBJ was the most likely materia medica that the Author would have chosen to translate. AFAIK, it had the same place in Chinese medicine as Dioscoride's herbal had in European herbalism.

And even if I had hunted among Chinese books for a more detailed statistical match, that would have been a perfectly valid thing to do.  Like hunting for European manuscripts with images that match the VMS images, or with letter styles that match the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. scribbles, or with month names that match those of the Zodiac.  If one suspects that some section of the VMS may be an encoded version of some German book, the obvious first thing one must do is look for a German book with a similar word and/or parag count.  

you had to design custom paragraph breaks in SPS to make the data fit better.  Otherwise I think you would just be happy with the obvious paragraph breaks.

Indeed, I decided to revise the parag breaks because I thought that wrong breaks may be the reason why the histogram of the SPS was broader than that of the SBJ.  But while I was revising those breaks, I did not try to "customize"  them to fit the SBJ histogram -- which would have been impossible to do "on the fly" anyway.  Again, the justification for every single break in my revised transcription is recorded You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  

And in the end, as I said before, that did not help: the histogram of the SPS was still broader than that of the SBJ.  Because my revision changed very few breaks.  Because most of the breaks were obvious (after a short line and near a star), and for the others I mostly agreed with the guesses of previous transcribers.

And, by the way, all that was before I found that 主 ≈ daiin.  Thus my revised SPS still has several of those guessed breaks before lines that start with daiin.  Now I see that those guesses were almost certainly wrong.

Excluding the blocks of lines with dubious parag breaks improved the histogram a little, but the improvement was not enough to justify publishing this "cleaned SPS".  I had to conclude that the cause for the broadening was something else.  

I thought that maybe the cause was inconsistent transcription of word spaces.  So I tried deleting all commas, treating all commas as word spaces, and deleting all word spaces and counting EVA characters instead.   But the histogram was still too broad.

But now, after analyzing the Rooster pair, I think I have a plausible explanation, at least for part of that extra variation.  While the SPS is generally an almost word-for-word match to the SBJ, I now see that the VMS Author omitted certain fields of certain entries -- like the "taste and warmth" at the beginning of the Rooster recipe, and the veterinarian uses and the "grows in..." field at the end.  (In fact, it is quite possible that those parts of that entry were added to the SBJ by the authors who reconstructed it after 1500.  And, luckily for me, the shortened version was still the longest parag in the SPS.) But such omissions must have affected different entries by different amounts; and that could explain some of the extra spread in the SPS.

All the best, --stolfi