The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

- Not all texts from China of the time we should consider were written in a script we nowadays would identify as Chinese, some were, to name one, based on the mongolian script.

OK,but that is not relevant.  The source of the Shennong Bencao Jing (SBJ), that the Author may have had access to, can only have been one of the printed medical encyclopedias that quoted it in its entirety, like the Zenghe Bencao (ZHB, first composed in ~1080 CE).  These were in Chinese characters, not Mongolian ones.

Next, there are huge differences between Wényán, the script a local copy of your book would uttermost probably have been in, and Báihuàwén, the script your local reader would have expected

The text that the Dictator had to read was definitely in Wényán ("Classical written Chinese"), and a very old form at that (apparently 200 CE or earlier).  

Hopefully the Dictator was a well-educated medical doctor who knew all the medical hanzi, and was used to reading medical books in Wényán.   But that assumption is not really necessary, because neither the Dictator nor the Author needed to know the syntax of the text's language.   Or even the meaning of the text.  Anyway, the SBJ has practically no complicated sentences: each entry is mostly a list of diseases or benefits of the drug, and the structure of each item (2-4 hanzi long) is almost always noun-adjective or verb-object. The differences between Wényán syntax and the syntax of the local vernacular would have been the least of the obstacles to the Author's understanding.

He could have been able to understand Wényán, if he was well educated, but he would then struggle to find words for it.

Maybe he did not know how to read some medical-related hanzi in the local vernacular (let's call it "Cantonese" for convenience).  Maybe he knew only how to read it in some other language, that people in that area used when reading Wényán.  In that case he may have used that reading.  The Author would not have understood the term either way; but would still have recorded it in the phonetic script, and perhaps asked for clarification later.

let's say, Albania.

A more pertinent analogy would be the Albanian guy at the Albanian pizzeria dictating the menu over the phone to a tourist at the hotel, who has only a limited knowledge of spoken Albanian. This tourist would write the words down phonetically, as best as he could, hoping that he could identify "presh" and "borzeelock" and other unknown words later in his phrase book.  

I strongly recommend you to skip the usage if AI here or setup a dedicated, owned LLM for precisely your purposes. Every new website Google founds would change your outcome otherwise.

Since I can't read or speak any Chinese language, I cannot avoid the lalamos for extracting and translating the SBJ text.  Fortunately, every hanzi of the SBJ has been discussed in hundreds of scholarly papers and books, so they don't lack reliable sources (which Google AI cites).  And I routinely check the output of one lalamo against another, until they agree.  

Anyway, the impact of eventual lalamo errors is limited, because at this point I do not need to know what condition 贲豚 is exactly, or how 主 was pronounced by the Dictator.  The key facts I depend on are that

1. Most of the time, one hanzi in the SBJ text (as quoted in the ZHB) corresponds to ~5 EVA letters in the VMS, with surprisingly little variation;
   
2. Overall, the lengths of the SBJ recipes match fairly well those of the parags of the SPS, accounting for the above ratio;
   
3. Each hanzi 主 in the SBJ almost always maps to a daiin in the VMS, at the expected place; except for occasional variations like laiin, kaiin, dain that look like errors by the VMS Scribe due to confusion of letters with similar shape. And the same occurs for a few other characters.
   

All the best, --stolfi