The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

When were the readings lost? When were they recovered?

Weird question.  

Do you perchance believe that when people today read the Sun Tzu aloud in "Classical Chinese", they are uttering the same words that Sun Tzu would have?

Those words were lost gradually over the next 500-1000 years.  By 1400 CE no one knew how Sun Tzu himself would have read those characters.  Those readings were never recovered.  Linguists are trying to reconstruct them, but they still cannot even tell whether the language that Sun Tzu spoke had tones.

The syntax of that language was probably close to that of "Classical Chinese".  However, texts in "Classical Chinese" can usually be parsed and interpreted in many ways.  The commonly accepted parsing and interpretation of Sun Tzu's text are only what people have agreed are the most likely ones, based partly on semantics, partly on what people believe was the grammar of his language, and partly on tradition -- "that is how that sentence has 'always' been interpreted". 

The Hebrew text of Genesis I.1 is generally parsed and interpreted today as "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth."  But I have seen bona-fide scholars claim that the proper parsing is "When God began to create the Heavens and Earth, ...".   It may seem to be a pointless variation, but it has significant theological implications...

All the best, --stolfi