The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What are [your cribs]?

For sure: 主 = "mainly for" --> daiin (but sometimes dain, kaiin, laiin, dair; or abbreviated as dam).

Almost sure: 气 = "vital energy"  --> chedy (but sometimes cheda, cheky, shedy, ...)

The former (zhǔ in modern Mandarin) almost always introduces the list of diseases that the drug is good for. The latter (qì in modern Mandarin) is a fundamental concept of Chinese medical theory: some sort of energy or impalpable fluid that IIUC)  carries the energy of food from the stomach and spleen to the lower abdomen and maybe other parts.

The other cribs are still to uncertain to list.  Please wait until I can confirm them...

Also I had a question about whether you may have developed a page ordering for quire 20 based on any of your crib matches or basic lengths of paragraphs?

I see the importance but have not looked hard into it yet.  

One problem that makes that question harder is that here are still recipes that have only relatively poor matches among the available SPS parags, or multiple matches with similar quality. 

Another problem is that I can use only 243 of the 365 parags that the SPS must have contained originally.  Apart form the four missing pages, I must exclude parags that have two or more stars in the margin, since they are likely to be two or more parags mashed together.  So, offhand I must expect that about 1/3 of the recipes will have no matching parag.

At first I was bothered by the apparent absence of any correlation between the order of the recipes in my SBJ file and the order of the matching parags in the SPS.  But not long ago I was told that I was using the wrong SBJ file.  The original order of the recipes in the Author's draft must have been their  order in the book from which the Dictator was reading.  This book was probably the Zhenghe Bencao or a similar medical encyclopedia.  The order of the recipes in the ZHB seems to be very different from the order in my first file (and the text of the recipes has small but crucial differences too -- like one extra 主 in the "red rooster" recipe).

I am now going through the ~60 recipes that I had already tried to match, updating their Chinese text to the ZHB version, and then looking again for matching parags.  I am about halfway through those 60. Then there are another ~300 that I have not tried yet... 

It is a slow process because I must rely on Google AI and other lalamos to translate each entry and make sure that the text is indeed the SBJ one, free from later interpolations.  That alone takes at least one hour for each recipe.  Then I must prepare the data for my matching programs and examine the output to decide whether the matches it found are convincing.

I need the translation because there are some parts of each entry that were systematically omitted by the Author, like the classification of each drug within Chinese medical theory (like 味甘微温  = "[red roosters] are sweet and slightly warming"), alternative (Chinese) names, its "provenance" (like 生平泽 = "[red roosters] grow on plains and marshes"), and some other occasional information that made sense only locally (like 东门上者尤良 = "[the heads of the red roosters] that were hung above the East Gate are particularly good for repelling demons"). 

Fortunately most of these omitted parts were at the beginning or end of the recipe, and thus do not interfere with the recipe-parag matching criterion.

So,I will answer your query as soon as I get enough convincing matches...

All the best, --stolfi