The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The mutual intelligibility of the written Sinitic languages is a key assumption of your entire understanding of the COT.

NO IT IS NOT.  It is absolutely irrelevant to it.

You have been at some pains to say that Classical Chinese is strictly a written language

IT IS.  

going through and giving readings to each word in the Classical language

There is no such thing as "reading each hanzi in Classical language".  There must have been one 2000 years ago, but by 1400 CE it had been already forgotten and no one could do that.

Here is a sentence in written Classical Chinese, suggested by Gemini: 有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎 What would be the "Classical Chinese reading" of it?

I don't think you're interpreting Victor Mair correctly.

I still think I did.

it is, let's say, odd to interpret a passage about what gets written down in China as phonetic because famously that is not the kind of script that gets written down in China

But he did not say "what gets written down in China".  He said "If one, as a tour de force, does contrive to write unadulterated Cantonese or Taiwanese".  That is, not writing in hanzi with Cantonese or Taiwanese grammar (which requires no "tour de force"), but in a hypothetical phonetic writing of spoken Cantonese or Taiwanese.

It is buck wild to see Victor Mair, of all people, interpreted as advocating for the widespread mutual intelligibility of Sinitic languages in writing

There are certainly people who argue that the Sinitic languages have no shared written form, just as there are people who argue that they are just "dialects" of Mandarin.

your use of "dialect" in this thread

IT IS NOT MY USE.  I always made it clear that "dialects" is terminology used by the Mainland gov for political reasons. 

I've preferred "varieties of Chinese" and other such forms

Well, that is a misleading name. Even worse than calling them "dialects".  US English and UK English are just "varieties" of English, still very far from "dialects".  One cannot say that Spanish and Italian are "dialects" or "varieties" of Romance -- even though their spoken and written languages are much more similar than Mandarin and Cantonese.

First of all, the vast majority of Chinese languages have never received a written form. Mandarin, Fuchow, Cantonese, Shanghai, Suchow, and the other major fangyan do not share the same written language. I have seen scattered materials written in these different Chinese fangyan, both in tetragraphs and in romanized transcription, and it is safe to say that they barely resemble each other at all.

Do you realize that romanization is a phonetic transcription of the spoken language?  Of course they don't resemble each other at all.  I gave an example myself, many kilobytes ago!

If by "tetragraph" you mean hanzi, I repeat the challenge of my last post: Please show an ordinary sentence in Mandarin that, when freely translated into ordinary Cantonese, would be very different from a syllable-by-syllable translation.  Or show a sentence in Mandarin that, when written in hanzi and read character-by-character into Cantonese, would be completely unintelligible to a Cantonese speaker who does not know Mandarin.

in phonology, lexicon, orthography, and grammar are so great that it is impossible for a reader of one of them to make much sense of materials written in another of them.

You are rolling all four things together as if the differences in the last item were all of the same order of magnitude as in the first two.  

Italian and Spanish are essentially mutually unintelligible, spoken or written; but their grammar is not very different, and a word-for-word translation would usually be understandable by the target speakers, even if not always grammatical:

   Ita: Se vuoi    fare  il pane, prima di accendere il forno devi  procurare farina e lievito.    
   W2W: Si quieres hacer el pan,  antes de encender  el horno debes obtener   harina y levadura.

That is still grammatical Spanish, although a bit stilted -- a free translation would omit the "el" before "pan", whereas in Italian the "il" is almost mandatory there. 

Would the grammars of Cantonese and Mandarin be more different than those of Spanish and Italian?  How would this example work in them?

It is also frequently asserted that, while there may be enormous differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiom among the major spoken Chinese fangyan, they basically share the same grammar. This assumption, too, remains to be proven, both in absolute and in comparative terms.

(Emphasis mine). So that claim is not false, it is just not proved yet?

When you bold "some" in "some common words", it changes the emphasis

Indeed. So?

no one is saying that there are no cognates between Mandarin and Cantonese

"Cognates" means two words in different languages with a shared etymology.  

I never said that the Cantonese and Mandarin readings of any hanzi are cognates.   They may or may not be; I don't know how many are, but it doesn't matter.  I can see that some pairs of readings are so different (like the "prima" and "antes" of the Spanish/Italian example above) that it seems very unlikely that they derived from the same ancient syllable.  But that is irrelevant.  As in that example, the point is that a word for word translation can be grammatical even if the replacement words are not cognates.

[bolding] "of any length" is especially strange to me because it is saying that those divergence points will show up even in very short texts.

It is the other way around.  "Texts of any length" in that quote obviously does not mean "texts of arbitrary length, even short ones", but is a (confusing) English idiom for "long enough texts".   Because the grammatical differences are few, thus they will show up only in longish texts.  Like the grammatical differences between Spanish and Italian.

Your remark about diglossia tipped me down a rabbit hole [...] What you are describing is not diglossia. If [someone] did not have to formally learn the H language, if he got it "for free" by learning L language, they aren't actually two languages there and it is just "glossia".

But that is why the concept of "diglossia" is clearly distinct from "bilingualism".   It means people effectively using two or more languages (in the strict linguistic sense - different lexicons and grammar) in different situations, while swearing that they are using the same language.   The technical term for those languages-within-a-language is "registers".

Again, there is very little diglossia in the US.  Examples would be people saying "ain't" and "gotta" in informal contexts but using "isn't" and "got to" or "will" or "must" when writing exactly the same sentences.  It is much more pronounced in other countries.

the dictation scenario does not work. ... If the language of the dictation is not mutually intelligible with the language you presume The Author spoke, then The Author could not understand the dictation or what he wrote down.

And I explained several times that (1) the dictation of that Very Very Old Written Chinese text, even if literal one-hanzi-at-a-time, would have turned each hanzi into a syllable of the local language (say, Cantonese as spoken in 1400 CE) -- because, for one thing, the Dictator would not have the foggiest idea of how the Divine Farmer would have read those hanzi in 300 BCE; and (2) any differences between the syntax of the Divine Farmer's language and that of Cantonese would hardly be visible in the SBJ sentences, because they are extremely short and simple (mostly 1 to 4 hanzi).  Why can't I get this point across?

Thus the main obstacle to the Author's understanding would be that he would not know 90% of the plants and maybe 80% of the diseases and other medical terms, even thought they would be all in Cantonese.  NOT the syntax. Not the fact that a doctor in Beijing or some other province would read the same hanzi with completely different syllables.  But, still, that dictation scenario is the best that the Author could possibly have done to try to bring the information contained in the SBJ to Europe.

All the best, --stolfi