The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Seems I could have been clearer that the point of this example was that "Il non mi piace passo de tutto" is French with Italian readings rather than Italian translated from French.

I offered that example only to illustrate the difference between a word-for-word translation and a free translation, nothing more.  It was not meant to be parallel to the Chinese situation.

Your reworking of my example is inappropriate for that simple goal, because the etymology of the words is absolutely irrelevant for any purpose except for linguistics research.  Thus the word-for-word translation of "il" (French masculine pronoun) is not "il" (Italian masculine article), but "quello" or "lui", depending on the referent.  And the word-for-word translation of "pas" is not "passo", because the French speaker does not think of a step when he uses that word; but is "niente" or "nulla" or some other similar Italian negation-reinforcing word.

I actually softened the example a bit because in this analogy French should have Latin spelling. To my best guess, this is what French with Latin orthography would look like, followed by French and Italian readings in French based on the real-world orthographies:
[quote]

• French, on the page: Illi non me placet passum de totus.  
  
• French, from the mouth of a French speaker: Il ne me plait pas de tout
  
• French, from the mouth of an Italian speaker: Il non mi piace passo de tutto
  

This version makes no sense with respect to reading or translating French to Italian.  The first line is not "French with classical orthography"; it is just (very bad and rather nonsensical) Latin -- another language altogether.  You could have used German or Russian instead; the example would not make less sense.  So the second line is a translation of that Latin text to French (and an incorrect one, because the Latin "passum" means step, while the French "pas" does not).  And the third line would absolutely not be "French, from the mouth of an Italian speaker", but an independent translation of that Latin text to Italian.

And that example is totally inadequate as an analog of the situation in the proposed COT scenario.  Again, Classical Chinese is not a spoken language, it is a written one.  What would be on the page would be 

  Very Old Chinese writing: 丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人...
  Read word-by-word by a Mandarin speaker: dān xióng jī wèi gān wēi wēn zhǔ nǚ rén...
  Read word-by-word by a Cantonese speaker: daan1 hung4 gai1 mei6 gam1 mei4 wan1 zyu2 neoi5 jan4...

Those are of course simplified characters and modern readings.  In the proposed scenario, the text would be in traditional characters, and the readings would be in Mandarin or Cantonese as they were in the 1400s. But it makes no difference, agreed? 

The Dictator would have used whatever was the local language that the Author presumably had learned.  Most of the syllables that he uttered, even though they were literal readings of the hanzi, would be common syllables of the local language, and the Author presumably understood most of them.   Whatever language the Dictator was using (including Mandarin), the syntax of his spoken sentences would be that of the Very Old Classical Chinese which the SBJ was written in -- not colloquial Mandarin or Cantonese, not even the  literary Mandarin or literary Cantonese of the 1400s.  But, since the sentences of the SBJ are extremely short, that archaic syntax would be the least of the Author's problems. 

It is possible that the Dictator did not do a hanzi-by-hanzi reading, but attempted to tweak the word order and hanzi readings on-the-fly so as to make the resulting spoken text more compatible with the grammar and lexicon of the local language, for the benefit of the Author.  This would make no difference for the proposed scenario, or for the SPS≈SBJ claim. Except that the extent of this adaptation must have been rather limited, because any extensive changes would change the spacing of the cribs and ruin the numerical matchings. And the benefit for the author would have been minimal anyway.

Thus a more relevant analogy using French and Italian could be

  Written: 5392
  By a French speaker, character by character: /sɛ̃k tʁwɑ nœf dø/ ["cinq trois neuf deux"].
  By an Italian speaker, character by character:  /ˈtʃiŋkwe tre ˈnɔve ˈdue/ ["cinque tre nove due"].
  By a French speaker, tweaking for grammar: /sɛ̃k mil tʁwɑ sɑ̃ katʁəvɛ̃duːz/ "cinq mille trois cent quatre-vingt-douze"].
  By an Italian speaker, tweaking for grammar: /tʃiŋkweˈmila tretʃɛntoˌnɔvantaˈdue/ ["cinquemila trecentonovantadue"]

All the best, --stolfi