The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Out of interest, what does a "spelling mistake" actually mean in this context? Like, what are the individual characters representing?

My best guess, as I have said before, is that the Author was a foreigner (probably European, but may have been Arab, Persian, Turk, Jew, etc.) who wanted to bring home some of those Chinese books that were highly regarded by the locals.  He may have been more or less fluent in the spoken language, but could not read the script. (I suspect that he could not even tell whether some Chinese text was upright or upside down, and had not even noticed that Chinese books have the binding on the right side.)  

So he did the only thing he could: he recruited a native to read the book aloud, while he wrote it down using a phonetic alphabet that he had devised to record the weird sounds of the language, as efficiently as he could -- meaning, with few strokes per phoneme.  As we discussed before, he could not write down a translation because most of the words were names of plants and diseased that he did not know.  He must have thought that he could build a glossary later. (And maybe he did, but it got lost.)

Thus there is in theory a "correct" version of every word in the VMS, namely the phonemes (with tones and everything) that someone truly fluent in the language would hear when the original Chinese character was properly pronounced.   An "error" is when the sequence of glyphs that we get from the transcription file does not match that ideal transcription.

There are many possible causes of those errors:

• The Dictator did not know the reading of some Chinese characters, and said a random syllable instead.
  
• The Dictator's pronunciation was sloppy, so his zhǔ often sounded like zhū, his qì came out as xì, etc. 
  
• The Author was partly tone deaf, and/or found it difficult to tell shēn from shēng, etc.
  
• He often wrote the wrong glyph but could not go back and fix it because he had to  keep up with the Dictator
  
• His handwriting was not very clear, so 20 years later not even he himself could tell whether the glyph he wrote was d or k, ee or Ch
  
• The Scribe found reading his handwriting even more difficult, and also made many errors from distraction (like swapping t for k, or ain for aiin
  
• BEEP
  
• The modern transcribers often had to guess whether something as Ch or ee, r or s, y or a - and guessed wrong.
  

In fact I think I see clues of most of these events having occurred in various places.

Moreover the script devised by the Author may have been intended to be a stenography system, not a proper spelling.  In stenography one often omits details of pronunciation in order to reduce the size of the alphabet.  (For example, in one system that I learned in my teens - but never used -- the voiced/unvoiced distinction was to be ignored, so that the same squiggles were used for p and b, t and d, s and z, k and g, sh and zh, etc.  When reading that script back, one usually had no trouble resolving those ambiguities.  As happens when whispering, which is speech with voicing permanently turned off.)

All the best, -- stolfi