The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

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.  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.

Again, the situation where someone goes through and simply makes up a new sentence with new words because they cannot read what was written down is illiteracy. In this description, Chinese people lost the words to Classical Chinese around the start of the Common Era, and from then on would not have had words to read or write Classical Chinese, despite this being the language of state for another 19 or so centuries.

Pardon the long quote, but it is really worth looking at what you said to explain this to me:

Suppose that Julius Caesar, during his stay in England, wanted to write that "the house of the king's soldier had a round window":

  domus militis regis fenestram rotundam habet.

But he had too much wine at lunch, so much tha he could not even remember the Latin letters. So he writes in ideograms:

    

Some 2500 years later, Martian archaeologists digging into the ruins of London find that wax tablet.  They can tell that it is some form of writing, but, due to their vastly different neurology and culture, cannot identify any of the objects depicted in those line drawings.  So they recruit one of the local Earthlings and ask him to read that inscription in English (a language which they had learned long ago, when their first radio-telescopes captured the radio broadcasts of War of the Worlds). 

So the Earthling reads

  house soldier king window ball hold

That is definitely not Latin, nor some hypothetical "Classical English".  It is a language with English vocabulary, so the Martians understand all those words, but the grammar is not English. The grammar is not Latin either, because it lacks the all-important Latin inflections that Caesar's "ideographic" writing did not record.  And some of the words used by the Earthling, like "ball", even though they are valid "readings" of the drawings, they are not the ones that Caesar intended.

Yet that dictated English reading would already give the Martians a good part of the meaning that Caesar intended to write down.

Back on Mars, the archaeologists would have to puzzle out whether that inscription is telling of a house-soldier grabbing an obese king through a window or whatever.   Eventually, if they managed to find a few hundred similar inscriptions, they may get a partial grasp of their peculiar grammar, and thus make better guesses about the meanings.

But that "broken English" reading is the best they could have obtained under those circumstances.  It increased their understanding of the inscription from zero to much more than zero.  An improvement of infinity percent...

Chinese writing is like Caesar drawing pictures drunk? It has no grammar? And the best reading that can be done of it today is a "broken" one? (And I am hoping you just got carried away by the analogy and do not mean to imply that Chinese people have different neurology from Europeans, though that has brought me up short every time I've read this passage.) This is a description of an artist who cannot express himself in words and an art critic who rightfully cannot piece together a sentence from it. That is a plain description of illiteracy! If you do not like the implications of that, well, I have been encouraging you to drop this formulation for some time