The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Insofar as you think the match is accurate, there is no ambiguity about the language. The Shennong Bencao Jing text you identify with the SPS is written in Classical Chinese.

The written language was Classical (written) Chinese, allright.  But, if the local language was any of the 50 dialects of Chinese, the Dictator would read each character as a syllable in that language.  

That is, the same 止血 characters would be read as zhǐ xuè by a Mandarin speaker, as zi2 hyut3 by a Cantonese speaker, as chṳ́ hiat by a Hakka speaker, etc.  Except of course for the 600 years of language change.  That is how the Chinese script works.  There is no such thing as "spoken Classical Chinese". 

A Cantonese Dictator would not read the characters in (1400's) Mandarin.  First, in his view the SBJ was just a written text, not a text in Mandarin or in any other specific dialect.  Second, he quite possibly did not know spoken Mandarin: he would not have needed to. And, third, he was dictating to a gringo who had become somewhat fluent in Cantonese, not in Mandarin.

The hanzi:EVA::1:5 proportionality seen in ROOS and other recipes would not depend on the Chinese dialect that was used by the Dictator.  In any of them each hanzi would almost always be read a single syllable.  The occasional exceptions may explain the gaps that are off by 1 or 2 hanzi from that proportonality.

For example, the name of the recipe is 丹雄鸡, literally "red male chicken".  The corresponding EVA text in parag f105v.32 is poar.keeo -- two words and 8 EVA letters instead of three words with ~15 letters. That may be because (say) poar is actually two words po.ar, and in the local language 丹 and 雄 read as two very short syllables. But it may also be because, in the local language, there was a single-syllable term for "rooster", and people would normally use it instead of "male chicken".  (Like in English people would say "rooster", never "male hen".)  Maybe.

The proportionality should also hold -- but with more variance -- if the local language was not a Chinese dialect (like Vietnamese or Tibetan). The Dictator would still read each character as a single syllable in the local language; but then the grammar would have been quite strained.  Still, given the very simple grammatical structure of the SBJ recipes, the stilted grammar would not have been a big problem for the Author.

the Scribe would not know Classical Chinese

I am using "Author" for the person who wrote the original draft, and "Scribe" for the person who clean-copied that draft to vellum.  Neither could read Classical (written) Chinese.  The Author would have been somewhat fluent in the local language and could pronounce what he wrote, although he probably understood only part if it.  The Scribe had learned to write the Voynichese alphabet but probably did not know the sound value of any glyph.

All the best, --stolfi