The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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. ... I think all of your critics grant the plaintext could be something other than the SBJ sensu stricto.

The problem is that there is no such thing as "the SBJ sensu stricto".  While the book has almost always been important in Chinese medicine, from what I read it seems that there is no surviving copy older than 1600 or so, and the existing versions are later reconstructions from incomplete fragments.

It is like the situation of several classics from Western Antiquity. When one says 'the Dioscorides herbal", "the Alchemists herbal", or "the Epic of Gilgamesh", one is actually speaking of a collection of variant texts, including translations in other languages.  Actually the situation of the SBJ seems to be quite a bit worse than that of Dioscorides

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. ... 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.

Sorry, I don't understand this point.  I agree that a translation into another language like Vietnamese or Tibetan, that had tried to produce text that was grammatically and stylistically good for this language, would have messed up the alignment considerably.  Like the translation of the SBJ into English does.  But, if the SPS is indeed a translation of the SBJ (as opposed to a reading in any of the Chinese "dialects"), it may be a stilted translation that tried to keep the Chinese word order and grammar, while translating only some Chinese syllables.

I attended a couple of Japanese Buddhist ceremonies where at some points the priest and/or he attendees are supposed to recite a prayer in Tibetan (text provided).  The prayer is indeed a string of isolated syllables that is totally unlike Japanese.  But I could see that it was not Tibetan either, since the phonetics and spelling were Japanese, again totally unlike Tibetan.  And probably many syllables had been completely changed/inserted/deleted, even way back when the prayer was imported into Japan.  This sort of thing may have happened with "translations" of the SBJ into other monosyllabic languages.

In Western languages, translation is a binary thing: a text is either definitely Latin or definitely German, never something in between. (There are a few so-called "macaronic" texts that mix two languages, usually Latin and a vernacular.  A medieval example is the the popular theatrical poem You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Two recent delightful examples are the poems You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. But those were intentionally satirical or comical.)  However the nature of those East Asian monosyllabic languages allow a continuum between mere transliteration of the Chinese text -- one Chinese character to one syllable, which is some approximation in the local phonetics of the Chinese pronunciation -- to a proper free translation, with vocabulary,  word order, grammar, and style of the target language.  IF the SPS is a translation of the SBJ into Vietnamese, Burmese, Tibetan, or whatever, it seems to be closer to the former than to the latter.

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.

I don't understand this either.  What discrepancy are you referring to?  The apparently missing texts at the beginning and the end of the SPS version?  I gave simple and satisfactory explanations for those omissions.

Any explanation for any discrepancy, in this case or in any other claim about the VMS by anyone else, would have to be conjectural.  Why is "ed" very common in some parts and absent in others? Why are p and f never followed by e, whereas CPh and CFh often are?  Why are there 30 labels in every Zodiac diagram,  never 31?  

If you demand explanations that are 100% certain, you'd better find yourself another hobby, because you will never get them here...

All the best, --stolfi