The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jonas Barnun]

Thank you Stolfi for sharing the EVA file, it's super helpful and fully understood, the EVA is just a mere convention to codify the characters in more easily readable letters with no phonetic value. 

One potential problem is that the same Chinese character may map to two or more different words in the VMS language.  For example, take 鸡子 = "chicken child" = "egg" in that Rooster recipe.  If the Dictator who read the book to the Author was Cantonese or Vietnamese, he may have said the word for "egg" in his language, rather than the word for "chicken" then the word for "child". 

Regarding this, I don't know for Vietnam, but I can speak based on my experience of China. There is a distinction between speaking in dialect and reading a text in a dialect. Typically a spoken Wu dialect or Cantonese would have specific syntaxic structures and specific words which are uncommon or inexistant in the Chinese lingua franca. However, when a Wu or Cantonese speaker reads a classical text, he would read it entirely word by word using his dialect pronunciation but without the need to changing any words. If we take Wu dialect as example (and even Mandarin today) we don't say 鸡子 = to say "egg", we say 鸡蛋 = Chicken eggs as there is a specific character for eggs nowadays. However, when one reads the original text, one would still read 鸡子 (with a specific pronounciation depending on the dialect). That's how Chinese was maintained as a single language, conserving characters while each region pronounced them very differently and had local words which were only used in spoken language. In other words, if the text say 子 in two places, the reader would typically read the 子 in the two places and would not switch to a different dialectal word in any instances. 

I did more digging in the Rooster, it's rough to find equivalents for other words which have more than 1 occurence (there is 杀, 血 also which have at least 2 occurences). To me the aiin / daiin hypothesis seem to hold pretty well, but so far it's hard to find other matches. I would be delighted if your efforts are more fruitful than mine! I have to say I am very impressed by what you have done especially you don't speak Chinese!

Jonas