The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Sorry, there was a mistake in this post and I had downloaded the Bencao file and noticed a few errors—probably from Google Translate. I've now decided to wait until Stolfi finishes the new version.

That file you downloads (F1) does have errors of several kinds:

• It is not the text that the Author would have access to in 1400 CE. That file F1 derives from a modern academic attempt to reconstruct the SBJ as it may have existed in 200 CE or earlier.  The version that got transcribed into the VMS must have been one embedded in some (much larger) printed medical encyclopedia that were created in 1080 CE and remained in use until the 1800s or later.  I don't have a clean file of this "right" version of the SBJ. I have a file (F2) that is an OCR of a later printing of that presumed encyclopedia, but the SBJ text in it is not cleanly marked, and I depend on the lalamos to extract it, one recipe at a time.  The differences between F1 and the version extracted from F2 are not great but are critical to my matching efforts: the main one is that F1 often uses 主治 instead of 主, or sometimes omits the 主 -- and that is the main crib that I use in the matching.
  
• That file F1 apparently was created by volunteers working through a wiki tool.  Thus it has many localized errors, like a missing recipe here, two merged recipes there.  Actually I got two versions of F1 (F1a from the Chinese Texts Project and F1b from the Chinese Wikisource); both are buggy, but not in the same places, so I was able to fix many errors by comparing them.  Needless to say, I did not correct any errors that may have existed in both files.
  
• The files F1a and F1b were in Chinese characters (hanzi).  I used Google Translate to convert them to modern Mandarin in the pinyin encoding.  By I don't know what language the Dictator and the Author used.  If it was one of the 50+ Sinitic languages ("dialects"), the mapping should be mostly one-to-one from hanzi to syllables; but not quite, since a few different hanzi have the same pronunciation in Mandarin but different pronunciations in Cantonese, and vice-versa, or a hanzi may have two different readings in Madarin depending on context, but only one in Cantonese, or vice versa, etc.  And if it was some non-Sintic language, like Vietnamese, the mapping may have been quite a bit messier.
  
• The Author apparently omitted certain parts of the recipes that made no sense outside of China (or even inside it).  Most recipes have a "[Flavor]" field at the beginning, right after the remedy's name, with 2-3 hanzi that classify the remedy in the theoretical framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Most recipes also have fields [Other name] at the end that give Chinese aliases for the name, and a field [Provenance] that specifies where the remedy grows or is collected -- usualy 2-3 hanzi, like "flat valleys" or "mountain streams".  As far I have checked those fields were always omitted by the Author.  It seems that the Authos also omitted some comments inside some recipes that also would make no sense in Europe, like "the heads of chickens that were hung over the East gate are particularly good at eliminating ghosts."   The file F1 still includes all those fields.
  

Still, that F1 file should be good enough for investigations like word structure, Levenstein neighbor graphs, letter correlations across word gaps, etc.  Only the last item above may have an impact on some of those studies -- because those omitted fields are highly repetitive, and they may be numerous enough to affects statistics.

I am preparing a new file F3 with some of those errors fixed, but it may still take a while.

All the best, --stolfi