The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Well, you have that text above to play with.  Do you see "babble-like sequences" in it?

Anyway, this doesn't happen in the VMS [...]

There is something funny going on...

As you may have guessed, that file is the digital file of the Shennong Bencaojing that I was using, read in Mandarin pinyin, obfuscated by an arbitrary spelling into latin letters and digraphs.   I  located the Chinese original entries corresponding to those highly repeated long strings.  The numbers <...> refer to my SBJ file.

6x, 10 words
  vuef jhut quky jhokd mep bifa yitd duitd jhotd xuikd 
  [jiǔ shí] qīng shēn bù lǎo, yán nián shén xiān.
  ［久食］轻身不老，延年神仙。
  [Prolonged ingestion] makes the body light, wards off aging, extends one's years, and turns one into a divine immortal.
  <b1.2.018> <b1.2.019> <b1.2.020> <b1.2.021> <b1.2.022> <b1.2.023>
 
8x, 8 words
  vuef fet quky jhokd yitd duitd mep bifa 
  [jiǔ fú] qīng shēn yán nián bù lǎo.
  ［久服］轻身延年不老。
  [Prolonged intake] makes the body light, extends one's years, and wards off aging.
  <b1.1.004> <b1.2.025> <b1.2.033> <b1.2.034> <b1.2.043> <b1.2.052> <b1.3.076> <b1.4.094>
 
7x, 6 words
  vuef fet quky jhokd mep bifa   
  [jiǔ fú] qīng shēn bù lǎo.
  ［久服］轻身不老。
  [Prolonged intake] makes the body light and wards off aging.
  <b1.1.005> <b1.2.029> <b1.2.046> <b1.3.078> <b1.5.105> <b1.6.113> <b2.2.015>

The repetitions, by themselves, are not surprising: in a succinct materia medica, one should expect the same indications and (in this case) benefits to appear in many recipes.

What is more surprising is that no similar repetitions are seen in the VMS.  I will try to identify the SPS parags that match those entries and let you know.  

Meanwhile, there is another curious detail. Many of those long repeated strings (marked in red above) occur close together in my SBJ fle, with numbers ranging from b1.2.018 to b1.2.046.  That again is not strange given the way the SBJ is organized.  What is curious is that I have tried to find the matching parag for a dozen recipes in that number range, and I could come up with a single convincing match.  

There may be other explanations for this failure, but one guess is that those recipes happened to fall into (a) one of the three "super-parags" on f108v, f11r, and f111v, each with ~10 stars; or (b) in one of the four missing pages.

And here is what the little devil on my left shoulder is whispering: perhaps it was case (b), and Wilfrid noticed those repetitions, and thought that they would make the book look like gibberish, and thus strategically "lost" those four pages.  After all, the book was a Bacon original, so he was not trying to cheat anyone, just removing a source of potential unnecessary confusion, right? 

All the best, --stolfi