The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

But I didn't understand how Chinese characters and Chinese syllables are related?

In the Chinese script, each character represents one syllable.  This is one of the shortest recipes of the Shennong Bencaojing:

• 鼺鼠主堕胎令易产生平谷
  

except that the characters would be written vertically, from the top down, with columns arranged from right to left.  Here is the same recipe with modern punctuation to show how it should be parsed:

• 鼺鼠：［主］堕胎，令易产。［生］平谷。
  

Here is how it would be read in modern Mandarin:

• léi shǔ:  [zhǔ]  duò tāi,  lìng yì chǎn. [shēng] píng gǔ.
  

This is pinyin, a phonetic notation for spoken Mandarin, derived from one devised by European missionaries in the late 1500s or so.   Each syllable (which is the reading of one character) is to be pronounced in one of four "tones" or pitch patterns,indicated by the diacritic -- rising, falling, flat, or falling-then-rising. 

There are actually 50+ distinct Chinese languages (which the Chinese government insists on calling "dialects" for political reasons). They are not mutually comprehensible but have more or less the same grammar and use the same characters, although they usually read them with different sounds.  This, according to Google Translate, is how those same characters would be read in Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong (and in many old Chinese martial arts movies):

• leoi4 syu2: zyu2 do6 toi1 ling6 ji6 caan2 sang1 ping4 guk1
  

where the digits indicate the tone of the syllable, which in Cantonese is one of six (IIRC).  

Vietnamese, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Krmer are other places in East Asia were people spoke a monosyllabic language and where a European traveler might have learned about Chinese literature.  By 1400 CE, a doctor or scholar who could access and read the Shennong Bencaojing would probably have read from a text in Chinese characters, and read each character as a single syllable but probably with sounds related to the local language, that did not resemble those of any Chinese dialect. 

Each character/syllable of Chinese has a broad meaning.  Here is a literal syllable by syllable translation into English:

• flying mouse: [main] to-fall fetus, to-cause easy birth. [to-grow] flat valley.
  

In fact, this translation is cheating, because each character could be translated in several other different ways. The character 主 could also be translated as "master", "chief", "to-govern", "mainly", etc.  The character 令 could also mean "to command", "to make", etc.

However, in Chinese many pairs of consecutive characters/syllables are compounds (like English "baseball") whose meaning is related to the meaning of individual syllables, but cannot be deduced from them, and must be learned on their own and listed explicitly in a dictionary.    A more meaningful translation of that recipe would be

• Flying squirrel: [mainly for] abortion and facilitating childbirth.  [Habitat] low flat valleys.
  

Note that the word "and" had to be provided by the translator, because in Chinese grammar the "and" is often implied by just writing two or more nouns together.  Chinese also does not have articles, possessive particles like English 's or "of", inflections for case, gender, number, mood, person, etc...

Furthermore, you believe the European author limited himself to phonetic transcription, without adding a translation into a non-Asian language?

Many of the terms in the Shennong Bencao are local plants, minerals, diseases, benefits, and other medical terms that even today we find hard to translate.  

For example, a key concept in Chinese medical theory  was that of 气 qì, which was some sort of impalpable fluid or vital energy that was supposed to flow inside the body to activate the functions of the various organs.  Sort of like the Medieval European concept of the "humors", but completely different.  Diseases were often described and explained as too little or too much 气 flow, of 气 being blocked, flowing in reverse, flowing to the wrong place, accumulating here or there.  Wheezing cough was called "cough with rebellious 气" because it was thought to be the result of the the 气 from the 中 flowing up towards the lungs instead of down towards the lower torso, as it should.  

And 中 = "middle,center" meant of course the "digestive center" comprising the stomach and the spleen.

Moreover the SBJ was written around 300 BCE in a style that is extremely terse, even by Chinese standards; so, by 1400 CE, even educated doctors and scholars struggled to understand it.  The last item in the "red rooster" recipe says something like "chicken white grub makes fatten fat".  Chinese scholars today conjecture that it meant that eating the beetle grubs that grow in the wood of chicken coops would make people grow fatter.  There are other guesses but they are even more dubious.

All this to say that it is very understandable that a merchant like Marco Polo and his uncles would not even try to translate the text.  He would not have been able to translate more than a few of the diseases, and would very likely get many things wrong.  And the local doctors would not be able to help, of course.

I suppose that he may have compiled a glossary with some of the terms.  But it would probably be a separate document -- probably on paper, like the draft must have been.  It would not be surprising f the two documents got separated early on, and the glossary got used as tinder to light fireplaces and stoves (which was the fate of many Medieval manuscripts on paper).

P.S. Jorge, if you had read even once the automatic translation by Google of your messages into French, you would know what "in a few sentences, without using abbreviations" means.

Sorry about that.  But the definition of the Chinese Origin theory is just the first paragraph of that post.  The rest of the message is free bonus.  

And  I did try to define all the abbreviations I used, except CE, BCE, VMS and EVA.  (You understand these, right?)  I think that repeating "Shennong Bencaojing" or "Starred Paragraphs section" over and over would make the text harder to read than using properly defined TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) ...

All the best, --stolfi