The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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).

An European who liveed for 4-5 years in "China" (China proper or any of the other candidate countries) would have become reasonably fluent in the local spoken language,but would be essentially illiterate in the written one.  Have you ever tried to learn Chinese characters? 

Thus copying the Chinese characters would be pointless: he would not be able to read them when he got back to Europe.  Whereas, if he  recorded the sounds of the characters as read by a local  doctor, back home he could  at least understand the common words, and could hope to learn the others by context etc.

Besides, if copying the characters was ok, it would have been simpler to buy a copy of that same medical encyclopedia.  Presumably he had to pay the Dictator for the service, so that would probably have been cheaper too.

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?

 

Just a guess from the blue, maybe 50%.  Here is a typical recipe:

  <b1.4.095>

  (A)    |Donkey-hide Gelatin:
  (A1)   |··[Nature] Sweet, neutral.
  (A3)   |··[Mainly for]
  (A31)  |····heart and abdomen
  (A311) |······internal hemorrhaging;
  (A32)  |····extreme exhaustion
  (A321) |······with shivering,
  (A322) |······resembling malaria;
  (A33)  |····lower back and abdomen
  (A331) |······pain;
  (A34)  |····four limbs
  (A341) |······aching soreness;
  (A35)  |··(In women)
  (A351) |····uterine bleeding,
  (A352) |····stabilizing pregnancy.
  (A4)   |··[Long-term Use]
  (A41)  |····lightens the body,
  (A42)  |····boosts vital energy.
  (A5)   |··[Another Name] Fùzhì-brand gelatin.

I don't know whether the specific Chinese characters for "lower back and abdomen" in that recipe (腰腹, yāo fù in modern Mandarin) were the ones commonly used at the time, or were rare synonyms used only in the SBJ and other old medical texts.  That is, whether yāo fù means "back and belly" or "lumbar and abdominal region".  Assuming the former, he probably understood those words right away -- and would have understood them later, back in Europe, reading his transcript.

In that case, he would surely have expected to to be necessary to eventually ask someone.

Indeed.  So he probably did build a glossary on the side. And not just for this "VMS project", but probably also for new words that he encountered outside of it.

All the best, --stolfi