The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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.

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. ...

Again?

what 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?

The language that the author of the Shennong Bencaojing spoke, like that of Sun Tzu, went extinct long before 1400 CE.  By then no one knew how those authors would have read those characters. Any of them.  Even today, the linguists have only guesses.  For the last 2000 years, when people read those "Classical Chinese" texts aloud, they have been using very different words.  Different words at different times, and even at different places.   Do you really believe that Sun Tzu would have read aloud his own writing as "Sūnzǐ yuē: bīng zhě, guó zhī dà shì..."?