The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

I have a lot to say about your most recent response to me, but the summary is not very hard to state: Morpheme readings are constructed to be cognate, but they may not represent lexical correspondence in translation. Let's unpack that.

Let's just start with "rooster" because it turns out to illustrate about as much as I could hope. The Classical Chinese term is 雄雞. If we are being very careful---and to this point I have not been consistent about this---this is not one word, but two. The way Chinese readings are assigned to the words is by reading off their cognate terms. By construction, 雄 is cognate with the Mandarin word 雄(xiong2), so the reading would be "xiong2". But this is not what we find if we look up the words for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in various languages*:

• Classical: 雄雞
  
• Standard: 公雞, 雄雞
  
• Beijing: 公雞
  
• Guangzhou: 雞公, 生雞
  

You can plainly see that readings in one will not necessarily give correct vocabulary in another. The overlap between Standard and Beijing Mandarin is down to the former being derived from the latter; the overlap between Standard and Classical is a direct borrowing read as a strict cognate, that is, a product of literacy.

Talking about syntax is a little more subtle. For starters, all the character pairs above have syntax, and it turns out in this example they all have the same word order, with the head final. Concretely, Beijing 公雞 and Guangzhou 雞公 have the same syntax here, but you can plainly see this does not guarantee that speakers of divergent languages will use the same word as the head and surface the same word order, even if they otherwise preserve the component words. If the Author spoke Cantonese, there would be two lost clues to meaning. A little bit of this is reasonable to cope with, but these are languages exactly because it is too much.

You've provided an analogy that shows the misapprehension here, I think.

When you say "pronunciation" and "phonetic standard", I don't know whether you mean "accent" (like an Italian speaking French with a strong Italian accent) or "reading" (like an Italian reading aloud each printed French word as the equivalent Italian word: "il ne me plait pas de tout" --> "quello non mi piace niente di tutto").

I mean closer to the latter, but the Italian there is using the wrong kind of equivalent. If I've traced the etymologies correctly, the Italian cognate of "il" is "il", while "pas" corresponds to "passo". Even though it is not the preferred Italian, "Il non mi piace passo de tutto," is the way to do this kind of reading. There may be some details I have missed, but the fact that the "Italian" has the "ne...pas" construction despite not being grammatical is illustrative, not in error.

There are genuine syntactical changes, and you can avail yourself of the many online resources that exist to see the full scope of them, but I will give one more at the level of morphosyntax. Some words became bound in Middle Chinese and, subject to further language change in the later languages. One such word is 甘, which no longer appears outside of compounds as it did in the Shennong Bencao Jing. The problem for the supposed Author is that he would, at least implicitly, be expecting 甘 to be bound, but it appears in an unbound context in the Shennong Bencao Jing and so he would likely guess at a different word with the same reading if he heard it, or, alternatively, he might try and bind it to one of the surrounding words and misread them. The logographs help prevent this, but by hypothesis he could not read them.

There's an important consideration in the previous example. I realize you have edited the SBJ to remove 甘 because it did not yield a crib, but otherwise the formulaic way that 甘 appears and its technical meaning are the kind of thing I can imagine him learning, and the Dictator teaching. Because most of the words in the descendent languages were cognates with the Classical language it is very easy to go one by one and explain why a smart person could figure out the correspondence. Indeed, the whole orthography is built to leverage this fact. The issue becomes that when there are lot of these sorts of changes, the cognitive burden is quite high.

To that point, we can get in the ballpark of how many of these changes have accrued using translation, up to some caveats:
SBJ: 主治女子崩中漏下。
English: Mainly cures vaginal discharge in women. (My translation, consulting various translations and dictionaries.)
Standard: 主要用於治療女性陰道分泌物。(Google Translate from the English.)
I will acknowledge that this probably overstates the case to a degree as my translation is not optimized for the exercise, nor is the machine's. I can quickly spot that "女性" would be "女子" if Google Translate understood what I wanted, and there are probably some other places that make this look more unfavorable than it ought to. But if you zoom out, the effect here is well-known. Classical Chinese is comparatively terse, and it is very normal for Classical to expand like this when translated into Standard. The finer details are beyond my ken, which is why I asked the toaster to do it and all the caution that entails, but the fact that Classical Chinese is different from the modern languages is quite well known. 主 translating to 主要 and 治 expanding to 治療 to distinguish homonyms is the typical situation.

As for this:

Again, the scenario we are discussing (with the Dictator reading the white-on-black text from the ZHB or similar book in the local language,while the Author writes it down with his phonetic script) is only my best guess for how Starred Parags section (SPS) came to be a transcription or translation of SBJ, approximately one-hanzi-for-one-Voynichese-word. If you think that scenario is unlikely, what alternative do you propose instead?

I reject the premise of the question. I do not think the identification is sound and the statistical argument you've made is based on cribs you identified because there were qualitative similarities. It is no surprise to me that there were able to quantify that, but I don't think its a valid or sound identification. Even if I'm wrong, you're well aware of my position that the difficulties transcribing Classical Chinese like this and reading it later corroborate my criticisms of how you made the identification.

My summary is the answer to this question:

It is sometimes hard to tell if they are glossing over the little hitch that Standard Chinese read this way is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese or genuinely in error

Are you sure?  Again, are you confusing "read with Cantonese words" and "read with Mandarin words in a Cantonese accent"?

I am quite sure! You cannot simply replace a passage of good Mandarin or good Classical Chinese with Cantonese cognates and call it Cantonese!



*It is quite unfortunate that my source terms these "dialectical synonyms". This is commonly seen, even in academic contexts, and I have curbed my impulse to be pedantic when other people have indulged it, but as they fail the mutual intelligibility test, they are properly called "languages". I would not be so firm about this but for the fact that calling them "dialects" has implications of Han nationalism, the invalidity of Cantonese and Hakka literature, and the correctness of efforts at "standardizing" spoken Chinese. In that vein, I would ask future "clarifications" that purport to quote me do not imply that I would have been clearer for supporting Beijing's efforts towards linguistic hegemony. As this is not mainly a political forum, I will let other people come to their own conclusions about how they want to talk about langauge diversity in authoritarian countries, but do not edit my quotes to support it.