The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Something seems to have gone wrong with the Thai version. What I see is a phonetic rendering of the original Chinese.

Ugh!  

However, the sounds of the individual syllables seem to be very different from those of the other versions, including Mandarin.  Are the syllables somewhat correct, but with a wrong (Chinese-like) grammar?  That could still be a "correct" rendering, because that seems to have been a common kind of "translation" used for Chinese classics in other countries.   

If the SPS was indeed created by a foreigner writing down dictation by a Thai doctor who was reading a Thai edition of the SBJ around 1400, could it have been something like that thing that GAI produced?

Note that Thai is not really monosyllabic, just 'largely' monosyllabic with many exceptions.

Thanks for the warning.  But it applies to all of those "monosyllabic" languages, including Mandarin.  I gather that Mandarin has a neutral-tone syllable that functions pretty much like an inflection suffix, like -ed,-ing, -ly, -tion in English.   I suppose that Thai has many more of those?

And, even in Mandarin, in order to understand a text one must group most of the characters into two- or three-character compounds, because they have meanings that cannot be deduced from those of individual syllables (like "typewriter" is not "an author who writes about kinds of things")

All the best, --stolfi