The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

There are a number of misapprehensions here about the text you are analyzing.

1. "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." We are in agreement on this point, but it bears on your comment You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., where you say, "Maybe in the VMS the 'main uses' keyword is often omitted, because it is superfluous." As you say, it is not superfluous, it is grammatically essential; if it does not appear at all, the topic is something else. The simplest assumption by far is that this would be true in the languages you consider likely to be the target languages of translation, not just the source language.
   
2. "In general, for each remedy here is only one 主治, followed by a list of diseases, conditions, benefits, etc." The reason there is only one is that you can append additional comments after the first. But if you delete the topic, as omitting 主治 would do, the topic role moves to the next word and the appended phrases become comments on that. In the original Literary Chinese of my example, 主治 is the topic and  寒濕風痺 and 黃疸 are comments; they have equal status. After deleting 主治, the phrase 寒濕風痺 becomes the new topic and 黃疸 becomes a comment on it. 
   
3. "The whole phrase is a single disease". The phrase is in fact four words which must be carefully interpreted, in part by considering its grammatical status as a topic or comment, and depending on which it is, how it might bear on the other. Because in the altered text 寒濕風痺 is in topic position and set off as a complete idea, and taken with the convention of four word phrases often representing complete sentences, it makes sense to check to see if those four words are acting as a clause rather than a noun phrase. This is especially true because "jaundice" is a strange comment on "rheumatism". If taken as equal and the topic flowing from the preceding sentence, they are a strange comment on the taste or herb name, whichever was included before. However you carve up the semantic space of the amended text, the bigger point of this remains: removing 主治 radically alters the grammar, and this kind of topic-comment relationship is essential to interpreting a Literary Chinese text.
   
4. "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." This is neither generally true, nor specifically. In general, grammatical roles can be marked by word order, as they largely are in English. This is specifically true in Literary Chinese. It is true that the topic sometimes carries over, and that topics nest (e.g., the comment may also a have a topic that is governed by the larger topic), but in the case of 主治, there is no source for the topic of "main indication" embedded in the herb name, as illustrated in point 3. The "main indication" cannot be the topic from the herb identification or the taste, which is why it is supplied.
   
5. (Not the main point, but illustrative of how this wider language area handles the grammar of topics and comments very differently from your understanding, Japanese and Korean do show very strong tendencies to front the topic. "Case" marking allows for violations of this, but they are still salient to the topic-comment interpretation. The matter that comes before the marked topic is usually taken to in some way control, limit, or otherwise specify the scope of the marked topic. At any rate, in topic-comment languages without overt topic marking, word order is the main factor in play.)
   
6. "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"." I'm not exactly sure what the white chicken worms are supposed to be in English, but we agree they are some kind of parasite. In context, they are clearly the "part" of the rooster that can be used; the comment on them is that they can fatten pigs. You don't need "主治" because "肥" serves to head the comment on these parasites.
   
7. "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." This again goes to the difficulties of approaching a Literary Chinese text. "生平泽" can be read as "raised on flat, fertile land," which is a perfectly good description for a farm. I'm on surer footing with this one as I knew the first two characters without the aid of a dictionary; the Chinese Text Project gives the glosses "marsh, swamp; grace, brilliance; damp, moist; fertile" for the last character. (生 is so flexible it appears on beer in Korea to indicate it has a fresh taste and on gay dating apps throughout the region to indicate a preference for unprotected sex; it is truly a next-level character in terms of needing to track the topic to decode it, and that is true through time as well. If it has a single meaning, it is "vital" in the root sense of "relating to life".) I'd be curious when and why scholars think it was added because I don't see much of a puzzle for what is there, but either way, under your theory the VMS is not far removed from the oldest extant copies that have it.
   

It should be mentioned that the difficulties of deleting 主治 are not my judgement; this is the judgment of the author(s) and copyist(s) of the versions of the SBJ you have found. In Literary Chinese, if something can be omitted it usually is. The fact that your source texts are scrupulous about including 主治 despite the fact that even with poor grasp of the language we can infer the pattern tells us that they were doing essential work.

Can you source for me the claim that this makes no sense: "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"." This doesn't ring immediately true from my first-hand experiences with Korean traditional medicine, which is that the animal in whole and in part, has the same qualities throughout, but that is a different system and I'm not 100% sure that impression is true anyway.