The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I don't presume this:

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. 

Well, I think you are just wrong here.  

In your version of the French/Italian example, the printed text that you called "Old French Spelling" is written in a phonetic script, so it has an inherent reading -- in spoken Latin.  Therefore what you called "French reading" is not a "reading", but a translation of that Latin (written and spoken) into French.

In the proposed COT scenario, the text that the Dictator was reading was nothing like your "Old French Spelling" phrase.  It was just a string of hanzi, with no inherent spoken version. Like the digits in my last example. There was no "Classical Chinese reading" to consider.  

The syntax of the written SBJ text presumably was that of the language that the SBJ author spoke in 300 BCE; but, AFAIK, no one knows which language it was or what it sounded like.  Linguists have their conjectures, but they are highly speculative; and any way the Dictator would not know that language either.

Thus the two readings that I gave, and their equivalents in any of the other 50+ Chinese languages, would all be equally valid readings of those hanzi.  And the syllables that the Dictator used would be common words from the local language.  If he were a modern Mandarin speaker he would read 鸡 as jī, because that hanzi means "chicken", and jī is the Mandarin word for "chicken".  He would not use the word for "chicken" in some imaginary "Classical Chinese language".

All the best, --stolfi