The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

Just about the potential cribs here, would it be worth searching for a far less common match? 

What I mean is a word that only appears once or twice in many recipes, but always in the same position when used within a recipe. For example, the word "grows" or the phrase "also known as". If you were to find a VMS match for a word like this, showing a positional match across recipes, that would be interesting.

Lets say hypothetically the word "grows" is found near the end of 80% of recipes, but is found at halfway through 20% of recipes (but NEVER both), finding a VMS word that acts the same way would be convincing. Even more convincing would be pairs of such words in recipes. If "also known as" and "grows" also happen to always be a similar distance apart in the SBJ recipes, and you find a pair that also match those attributes, it would be seriously interesting. 

   

I don't know if such words and phrases exist in either text, and this is obviously far easier said than done. 

With something like "daiin", it is so common throughout the text that it will undoubtedly coincidentally match with something. I'm not saying your results show nothing, but my suspicion is that if you were to do a similar analysis between a european recipe book and the SBJ that you would also find matches given the nature of the content and the natural flow of such works.