The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[tavie]

Again, let's try to keep things civil and not make assumptions about people's motivations.    

There may indeed, as eggyk said, be a certain amount of "talking past" each other.  There are clearly different and probably incompatible positions here, but the exact nature of the disagreements may be getting blurred by different interpretations of terms and other things.  

I think this thread would benefit from everyone being clearer - even laboriously so - about what you mean and how it relates to this specific element of the Chinese theory.  As well as making sure you both know where each other stands, this would be helpful for those of us who have limited background on this and have neither followed all the intricacies of the debate nor want to wade through 68 pages to unravel it.  

For instance, let's be clear exactly how it is envisioned the Caesar example relates to Chinese, given that it hinges on illiteracy and Jorge is adamant he doesn't mean this in the context of Chinese.  If this is an analogy about not needing grammar if you can recognize individual words, let's be clearer about that, and why it holds (or doesn't hold) for the dictation theory.  

Let's also be clearer what we mean by when using words like "read" and "words" in phrases like "By then no one knew how those authors would have read those characters" and "they have been using very different words".  Do we mean different meanings or simply different pronunciations, i.e. we still can't reconstruct reliably how Sun Tzu would have pronounced the words including even whether he would have used tones, but the meaning is still the same?