The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I assume this is the Classical orthography I constructed? If so, I am fairly unambiguous that it has no "inherent pronunciation" and refer to it as only "on the page".

I don't see what would be the point of that example with a constructed "Classical French orthography" that never existed, and besides would not be the same as a "Classical Italian orthography".

The written forms of the Romance languages did not evolve gradually from written Latin.  Rather, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the spoken language (the "vernacular") in each region evolved, mostly (but not totally) independently, from "Vulgar Latin".  This was a distinct language, with mostly Latin vocabulary but radically simplified and modified syntax (without declensions and other hard-t- learn features, but with prepositions, articles, analytic tenses, fixed word order, etc) that was used by the Roman army and administration.  This language arose out of necessity, because this population consisted mostly of non-Latin-speakers recruited from all over the Empire, who would have been unable to learn the true Latin grammar.  

Meanwhile, what little writing that occurred continued to be in more or less correct Latin, with declensions etc -- not in the vernaculars, not even in Vulgar Latin.  Because "writing" then meant "writing in Latin, of course, what else, silly question".  Some writers,especially outside the Church (students, notaries, lawyers etc.) often injected vernacular words and syntax in their writing, but that was not intentional; the result was not written vernacular but just broken Latin.   

It was only around 1200, give or take a few centuries, that writers and poets realized the absurdity of that situation, and decided that they should write in the language that they spoke.  Some govs even explicitly switched from Latin to the written vernacular as their official written language.  They still used the Latin alphabet, and the spelling was somewhat based on Latin spelling, and it took another century or two before it became more or less fixed; but the result was no longer Latin, not even close -- and it was radically different for each spoken language.  

That is why your modified example is both wrong and irrelevant to the Chinese situation.  There never existed an "Old Spelling" that would have been distinct from Latin but shared by both French and Italian; and there could not be, because the phonetic Latin alphabet would give such an "Old Spelling" an intrinsic reading that would have been a distinct spoken language, definitely neither French nor Italian.  Whereas the 50+ "Chinese" spoken languages, while mostly not mutually intelligible, do have essentially the same written form -- which, being ideographic and not phonetic, does not have an intrinsic pronunciation. 

Your objections to the dictation scenario seem to derive from a commitment to the denial of this fact.  I understand that the Gov of Taiwan, for political reasons, may want to pretend that their written language is completely distinct from that of Mainland China.  It would go with their rejection of the "communist" simplified hanzi and of the Pinyin Romanization in favor of traditional characters and Gwoyeu Romatzyh.  Which is just as Orwellian as the insistence of the Gov of Beijing, also for political reasons, that the Chinese languages are just "dialects" of the "Chinese" language (Mandarin) and not distinct languages.

The situation seems to be the same as that of Serbian and Croatian, only that in reverse. AFAIK, linguists agree that the spoken forms are essentially the same Serbo-Croatian language, which has a Croatian spelling using Latin letters and a Serbian spelling using Cyrillic.  But I gather that some people, especially in Croatia, insist that they are completely different languages -- again, for political motives.

The Chinese situation is much more like my last numeric example.  The written form  of the numbers is the same for all European languages.  It has a single "alphabet" and "spelling" (the digits) and a specific "syntax" (the big-endian base 10 notation); but has no intrinsic pronunciation, because the "alphabet" is not phonetic.  The same written number is read in very different ways by speakers of different languages; but none of these readings is less "proper" or "original" than any other.  And thus they would be "readings", not "translations".  And for, any reader, the existence of other readings is irrelevant.  

And, while each language has its own syntax and inflections for numbers, that differs somewhat from the mathematical "syntax", in any language the number can also be read digit-by-digit, and still be understood just as well.

All the best, --stolfi