The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

But, by the time of the "dictation", that language had been lost for more than a thousand years, and no one knew what that word could have been.  Not even people who spoke languages that descended from it.   

And yet 水 continued to have meaningS to this day, not only to speakers of all Sinitic languages but also to speakers of Japanese, and to scholars reading old Korean and Vietnamese books.  Maybe to some of those people the meaning of 水 is a word -- but it will be a different word to different people, and none of those words is "THE" meaning of  水.  But to other people the meaning of 水 is not a word but the concept of water; and it so happens that, for most people who know that character, it indeed means the concept of water -- either directly, or indirectly through a word that means water to them.

You've made it very clear that I don't understand what is going on, so perhaps you could explain this a little slower. When were the readings lost? When were they recovered?

I see the verbs now. You should probably put on the pages where you are getting the text from to avoid this confusion. But yes, this is the robustness problem I have. If you're matching to texts with entirely different wording, it is probably because you're seive is not very discriminating.