The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

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.

The syntax of The Art of War is no more complex, making extensive use of the 4-word phrases and their variants that were extremely important in Classical Chinese and are only used sparingly and as a literary affect in Mandarin. These clauses are famously tricky for their austerity and very precise syntax, not in spite of it, so this remains a strange line to me. Either way, the example illustrates how common they were, and how translation does not respect them. This is because the syntax and vocabulary that made them possible have changed enormously. This is especially obvious in the first and last lines of my example, but continues throughout. Again this matters because the way for The Author to learn these forms is through participation in the literate culture because they do not make sense in the later languages, both as grammatical objects and also as because they cannot be usually be parsed aurally and must each be memorized.

Also, you cannot account for the output of an LLM, and you cannot expect me to do it for you. I thought I had answered this, but because the conversation has sprawled I apparently cut it. Nonetheless, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. several of the mistakes Google's LLM made and showed that if the neural net is not contaminated with the Classical original it arrives at a very different output and briefly explained why that is expected. I stand by those remarks. The bottom line is that if I wanted opaque output from Google's LLM, I would cut out the middle man and ask it myself. I have offered lexicographical accounts, the judgement of experts, and now translations by and for humans that back my position. I am not going to pretend "I asked an LLM" outweighs that.

Eggyk, if Jorge retreats to your position I will address it in more detail, but I think that graphic very much highlights the substantial challenges proving those texts match. There are also implications for the nature of Voynichese itself if the number of Voynich letters per Chinese character falls below the average number of letters per Voynichese word, and that would have to be addressed. Either way, I'm not misunderstanding Jorge here, he keeps returning to the idea that Chinese can be translated morpheme-by-morpheme, and that is just not true, and his argument must account for that.