The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Second, we don't know the language and what sort translation the source book was.  If the Author was in, say, a Cantonese-speaking area, we may hope that the Chinese characters were basically those of the digital file, and Dictator read each Chinese character as one Cantonese syllable.  But if the thing happened in Vietnam, the text as read by the Dictator may have not been one-Vietnamese-syllable-for-one-Chinese-character-in-my-file, because the grammar of the two languages is completely different.  However the close match of the word counts makes this possibility rather unlikely.

Moreover, the SPS version of the "Rooster" recipe almost certainly omitted the "taste and warmth" field of the Chinese version, and the "veterinary uses" and "where it grows" fields at the end.  If similar omissions occur in many other recipes too, they will affect the ratio above (average words per parag / average chars per recipe) Thus the actual correspondence of VMS words per Chines chars may be closer to 1 than to 1.08.

I am going to reiterate some issues I raised previously:

1. Formally, this is a problem for claiming a match. Insofar as this is what your paper proves, it does not show that the SPS matches the SBJ; it shows the SPS matches an unknown plaintext which itself does not match the SBJ. Having to posit that the plaintext is mangled beyond matching the SBJ to explain how only a few words appear to line up is tantamount to saying it does not match the SBJ. It is not enough to establish plausibility here; I think all of your critics grant the plaintext could be something other than the SBJ sensu stricto. It is also plausible that the reason for the extremely contingent and narrow alignment your paper identifies is that they are not, in fact, related texts and the alignment is mere coincidence. What proof do you have that allows us to actually reject the null hypothesis that the SBJ and SPS do not match?
   
2. With that question in mind, there are substantive reasons I expect that we can't, beyond the difficulties of formal proof. All the languages you mention are topic-comment languages, which means that the topic cannot be omitted without altering the meaning of the text substantially. To a point, I grant that the translation could have been fairly "free", supplying a new or synonymous topic, and hence the question of point 1 is how to know it. But it bears saying that even if you persuade me that's what happened, that is not the simpler explanation. The simpler explanation is that the topic-comment structure, as well as the relentless parallelism, of the original was preserved in translation to any of the posited topic-comment languages. So if I'm being asked to evaluate how plausible I find it that the SPS is the SBJ in translation without rejecting the null hypothesis, I don't find that to be a particularly natural assumption about how the text came to look the way it does.
   

For my part, I would be much more persuaded if we moved beyond discussing potential scenarios that could explain the discrepancy you acknowledge and focused on what does explain the difference.