The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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 [edit: Dictator] even if he were proficient in the [Author's] alphabet. Further, the gap in vocabulary was wider than the gap between Latin and it's vernacular descendants, not just because of sound change, but because of a fundamental shift from one character to two character vocabulary, so the [Author] would have no point of entry for understanding it. This method would not create a useful record for the [Author], 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.

I am sorry, but I still don't understand the objection. 

The Dictator did not care about what the Author was writing.  The Author wrote everything down, even though he failed to understand many of the words.  Neither of them cared about (or needed to know) any other languages besides the local one.  Neither of them cared about hypothetical other people who spoke different languages.  Back home the Author could read his notes and "hear" them in that local language, and understand them as well as when they were dictated to him.  Maybe by then he had learned a few more technical terms. That was the best he could possibly do.  

And if the Author read aloud what he wrote, just after writing it down, the Dictator would hear just what he had dictated (modulo the Author's flaws in pronunciation). Like the original printed text, that would be Classical Chinese -- which is a written language, not a spoken one -- read in the local spoken language.

All the best, --stolfi