The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There's a few ways to interpret what you've written, so you tell me which is the main position you're defending. It may not be any of these, feel free to clarify:

1. A text in Classical Chinese read with vernacular pronunciation constitutes a translation in and of itself, hence the Author could comprehend a substantial amount of text
   
2. The Author was mainly creating a phonetic record of a recitation, and could phonetically recite the text but had low comprehension
   
3. The VMS represents a translation as well as a phonetic encoding; e.g. there are substantial changes to make it conform with the vernacular that go beyond phonology
   

Definitely not 2 or 3, but not quite 1 either.

All Chinese "dialects" have the same basic grammar.  Chinese writing is supposed to be read character by character in each dialect, and the result will be grammatically correct vernacular.  You may call it a "translation" if you wish; but then even reading a written text in Mandarin would be a "translation".

It is not just a difference in "pronunciation".  Those "dialects" are often mutually unintelligible, because they may have completely different sets of  phonemes, and there will be no simple rule to map the syllables of one dialect to to those of another.  Here is how 崩中漏下赤白沃补虚 (a bit of the Rooster recipe) would read in modern Mandarin, Cantonese,and Hokkien:

M: bēng zhòng lòu xià chì bái wò bǔ xū
C: bang1 zung6 lau6 haa6 cik1 baak6 juk1 bou2 heoi1
H: ping tòng liō hā tshik pi̍k ok póo hi

All three readings would perfectly valid, and none is more "true" or "grammatical" than any other.

Of course there will be differences between the classical and everyday language, and between 2500-year-old "classic" and 200-year-old "classic", like there are in Mandarin.  These differences may include grammatical constructs and rules specific to the everyday form or each dialect.  But that should not be a problem for the Shennon Bencao, since its recipes are very simple grammatically, consisting of lists of noun phrases or sentences that are rarely longer than three hanzi.  (A much bigger problem for the Author is that he would not have recognized the vernacular names of many of the diseases and plants.)

The situation would be more complicated if the local language was not a Chinese dialect but another unrelated monosyllabic language like Vietnamese, because the grammar would be very different.  Vietnamese, for instance, has different subject-verb-object and adjective-noun orders.  Then we have at least three possibilities: each hanzi read in some local pseudo-Chinese normally used for that purpose (like Japanese "on" readings); or each hanzi read as an equivalent vernacular word (like the Japanese "kun" readings), but still with the Chinese word order; or a more free translation into vernacular that tries to respect the local word order.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows two of them, as best as I could make them out with the help of Google Translate and ChatGPT.  

All the best, --stolfi