The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

So, if I understand correctly, the SBJ was widely printed and distributed with the same chinese characters across a large area consisting of various dialects and languages. In each of these areas, people would read those characters in their own dialect and come to understand the contents.

If this is the case, and if the VMS creator wanted one day understand the contents by asking someone, why on earth would it be a more logical choice to create a written language that depicts a single dialect when read aloud? Surely the chinese symbols would have been hugely more valuable here, as they may have been understandable to far more people over a far larger area (in fact, by any potential learned asian person who may have arrived by sea in europe). On the other hand, the VMS script spoken aloud would have only been half-understandable to a single dialect. 

How many of the words in the SBJ do you expect the VMS author to have understood when spoken? Perhaps a couple of the nouns, perhaps some simple verbs? I cannot imagine that he would ever have expected to understand much of it. In that case, he would surely have expected to to be necessary to eventually ask someone.

Jumping back in briefly, this kind of recitation of a classical text was extremely unusual because it is incomprehensible. Language change meant it was a very different situation from Latin where national pronunciations were quite understandable and educated people were expected to be able to converse in them. A phonetic transcription would have been opaque to the reader even if he were proficient in the scribe's alphabet. Further, the gap in vocabulary was wider than the gap between Latin and it's vernacular descendents, not just because of sound change, but because of a fundamental shift from one character to two character vocabulary, so the scribe would have no point of entry for understanding it. This method would not create a useful record for the scribe, nor could someone trained in Classical Chinese understand it if he read it back to them, and this would have been apparent to everyone involved at the outset