The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

On my bike ride today, it occurred to me that I could probably illustrate the difference between the Classical and vernacular language with a translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War. I cannot speak to the details, but in broad strokes You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is what I expected. Before even looking at it, the fact of the translation should be enough to cast doubt on the idea they are the same language

I don't get your point here.  

Sure, the language(s) spoken by the "Divine Farmer" and Sun Tzu in some royal court before 300 BCE were vastly different in vocabulary, phonetics, and syntax from any language spoken anywhere today, or in 1400 CE.  Those authors may also have opted for a rather succinct style in writing, did not use any punctuation, and may have omitted inflections and particles that may have existed then.  And many characters that they used changed their meaning to various degrees since then.  Thus, if one wants to convert texts "of any length" (= "long enough") from that period to natural fully grammatical running prose in any modern language, a one-hanzi-for-one-syllable will not work.  One must change the syntax, replace characters, insert missing connectives and punctuation, even replace whole idioms with completely different idioms.  

And I never claimed otherwise...

But that is totally irrelevant for the proposed dictation scenario and the claim "SPS ≈ SBJ".  The syntax of Shennong Bencao is extremely simple: mostly enumerations of 2-5 hanzi phrases that are single dictionary compounds, or noun-adjective pairs, or verb-object pairs.  As I explained before, if one does a one-hanzi-to-one-syllable reading in modern Mandarin or Cantonese, one get a spoken text that, while slightly ungrammatical by the rules of those languages, it still perfectly understandable by anyone who speaks only that modern language.  Except that this hypothetical listener may not know many of the terms, because they are technical names of exotic plants or specific medical conditions; but this problem would remain even with a free translation.

Just You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. such literal one-to-one readings of the beginning of the "rooster" recipe into modern spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and the minimal changes that (according to Google AI) would make those sentences grammatically correct in the respective languages.  The changes were small, and mostly confined to the keywords that introduce  the real contents.   Like replacing [zhǔ] "[main]" in the Mandarin reading by [zhǔ zhì] "[main uses]", or (nǚ rén) "(women)" by (nǚ rén de) "(for women)".  Obviously, these syntactic flaws would be the least of the obstacles to the Author's understanding of the text.

All the best, --stolfi