The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The problem is that there is no such thing as "the SBJ sensu stricto".

This is indeed a problem!  I don't see how we can definitively identify the text if we don't even know what the text is, and I don't see an explanation of how you are overcoming this problem.

Forget Chinese and the SPS for a moment, and suppose instead that someone finds an "Alchemist Herbal" in Italian (AHI) which has about the same number of plants as the Herbal-A section of the VMS (VHA).  He wonders whether VHA may be a version of AHI.  He notes the following things:

• The most common word in AHI, A, occurs seven times in the longest entry of the AHI.
  
• Eacluding two of them, the other five occurrences of A  are separated by  32, 13, 25, and 30 words.
  
• The most common word in VHA, V, occurs five times in the longest entry of the VHA.
  
• Those five occurrences of V are separated by 30, 14, 26, and 31 words.
  
• At positions corresponding to the two excluded occurences of A, the VHA has words V1 and V2 that are very similar to V.
  
• Words V1 and V2 occur three times on that entry.
  
• Disregarding one of them, the seven occurrences of V, V1, and V2 are separated by 30, 14, 10, 16, 21, and 10 words.
  
• The seven occurrences of A are separated by 32, 13, 15, 11, 14, 19, and 11 words.
  

(The numbers for the VHA are totally made up, but pretend they are true.)

However, the AHI entry has 10 words before the first A, while the VHA entry has only 2 words before the first V.  And the AHI entry has 19 words after the last A, while the VHA entry has only 6.

Are these discrepancies reason enough to reject the claim that the VHA is a version of the AHI? 

Further research shows that there are several versions of the AHI out there, which differ in many details -- including whole sentences or whole entries being added or deleted.
(Check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for an actual example of this variation.)

I am sure that any palographer would see the coincidences above as very strong evidence that the VHA is a version of the AHI.  After all, the initial decipherments of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hittite, Linear B, etc. were based on much more limited evidence.

here is entry 97 from the middle section: 主治寒濕風痺，黃疸。I've chosen this because it is short, but it gets the essential point across. Classical Chinese is topic-comment, which means the first part of a clause tells us what is being talked about. The first part of the clause here is "主治", ... Another use is then juxtaposed, "for jaundice", 黃疸.  Crucially, you cannot omit "主治", as "寒濕風痺，黃疸," has a different topic.

Well, grammatical or not, that is what the SBJ text is.  In general, for each remedy here is only one 主治, followed by a list of diseases, conditions, benefits, etc.

The SBJ is not meant to be a literary text, like Culpeper's Herbal (which may have been so popular precisely because 75% of the text is entertaining chitchat).  It is more like a catalog of drill bits, or a list of ships and their cargos.

But anyway I don't think your claim is correct.  I don't think in Chinese you must repeat the topic before every thing you say about it.  That is precisely why it is called "topic", not "subject": once you state it, any further statements refer to it by default. 

AFAIK Chinese does not have a word for "and", so even in a list of just two things they are just written one after the other.  (Instead of "I saw Joe, Jack, Mary, Lou, and Jeff", it would be "I saw Joe, Jack, Mary, Lou, Jeff".  Not a big difference...)

And there is no special marking for topics (like there is in Japanese), and not every new phrase is a topic for what follows.  The parsing of something as "topic" or "comment on the previous topic" is based on the semantics, not on grammar.

provided the four characters 寒濕風痺 are still read as a unit, they become the new topic, and jaundice becomes the new comment.

The whole phrase is a single disease, "motion impediment caused by cold, dampness, or wind"; literally "cold-pain dampness wind impediment", that is probably "rheumatism" .  It does not become a new topic in part because the next phrase 黃疸 "jaundice" (literally "yellow skin-disease") cannot be a comment on "rheumatism", so it is naturally parsed as another use.  Even without the comma (which I doubt was used in the 1400s).

If you think it is categorically impossible to definitively identify the text, then I suggest you withdraw your claim of a definitive match in the conclusion of your write-up and recognize why that is drawing so much scrutiny. If you believe you have definitively identified the text, it is not enough to give an explanation for why there are substantial problems with the match, you need to give the explanation, and strong reasons to accept that as the definitive reason.

See above.  In this sort of claim, "book" does not mean a specific sequence of words, but an open collection of texts that are obviously versions of some original, even if they have lots of differences. The Shennong Bencaojin is not special.  Every old "book", like the Dioscorides Herbal, the books by "Hippocrates", and Euclid's Elements, is a "fuzzy text" in that sense.

Part of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments (~100 BCE) have been firmly identified with the Hebrew Bible, even though there are altogether thousands of differences between them and the next oldest version of the latter (the Masoretic version of ~1000 CE).  Explanations may have been offered for some of those differences, but I doubt that any of them came with the "strong reasons" you demand.  Neither the explanations nor such reasons were necessary for the identification to be accepted as certain.

The apparent omissions arise as part of your process for identifying the text, which means an explanation is that they are because of flaws in that process.

I don't get the point.  Obviously explanations are needed only because I identified the SPS text as the SBJ minus three sentences.  And I provided plausible explanations.

Again, the first omitted item would have been 味甘微温 = "sweet and slightly warm".  That field, specifying the taste and "warmth" (in the sense of Chinese medical theory) of the remedy is the first field in most recipes.  But for this particular recipe it makes no sense.  The recipe is about seven separate products extracted from the rooster, from quills to the white part of the poo, and it is impossible that they all have the same taste and "warmth".  This entry may well have been an addition by the scholars who reconstructed the SBJ in the 1600s -- and added it only because "every entry must have had it".

The second omitted sentence, the next-to-last field of the recipe, lists two veterinary uses of "rooster" (not clear which part, maybe the eggs): 鸡白蠹，肥猪 = "to fight chicken parasites and fatten pigs" (literally "chicken white worm, fat pig"). But the SBJ generally is not concerned with veterinary medicine.  I have seen claims that this sentence was probably a marginal note added by some farmer or veterinarian to his copy of the SBJ, which then got copied as part of the text.  I gather that this sort of thing happened quite often with European manuscripts.

And the third omitted sentence was the last field 生平泽 = "grows in marshlands".  Again it does not make sense for "rooster", since it is a domestic animal that is raised everywhere.  I have seen claims by scholars that, like the "taste" field, this field was added later "because every recipe must have had it".

So, it is quite plausible that those three sentences either were not present in the version of the SBJ that was the source of the SPS, or they were omitted by the Author because he they made no sense for him, or he did not care for them.

All the best, --stolfi