The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

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?

Let's focus on your position for a little bit. I strongly suspect we don't agree about what this question means, but at any rate, you feel you've had trouble getting your point across and I'm misrepresenting you, so let's focus on that before I answer this.

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.

Because, see, this is where I'm confused. You objected that it was "absurd" to suggest you held these people illiterate, but now you seem to hold that by 1400 CE no one could read Chinese anymore, and if I understand you, they still cannot. If they lost the words and were entirely dependent on interpreting the "pictures", that is a state of illiteracy. Indeed, your example You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is one where someone draws pictures and later aliens cannot read the words. I understand why being confronted with the plain implication of that is jarring  because it was meant to be, but if that is meant to illustrate how Chinese people relate to their written language (which would not be a language, as such), it is a description of illiteracy.

But maybe I'm the one being obtuse here, so perhaps an example could clarify what I'm asking about. What would you say is the first character (in printed order, not chronologically) from the rooster entry of the Shennong Bencao Jing that was lost as a word? What's the first character that was no longer known as a word in Classical Chinese by 1400? What was the great hurdle to the Dictator reading it?