The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

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. ... 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.

Thanks, I will try.  The Caesar and Martians story meant to illustrate how Chinese writing works, and what its syntax means. But I will not try to explain it, because I am afraid I would be mis-"quoted" again as claiming that Caesar went to China or that the Chinese had no houses.

But none of our discussion, including that story, has any relevance to my SPS=SBJ claim, to the Chinese Origin Theory, or to my proposed Dictation Scenario for the latter.

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?

Yes, that is pretty much it.  

If Sun Tzu had been asked by the Emperor to read his book aloud, he would not have said "Sūnzǐ yuē: bīng zhě, guó zhī dà shì...". Not even remotely close to that.  That is a reading using basically Mandarin syllables, which is how a well-educated Chinese may read his words today; but some may read it very differently.  Like, it seems that some well-educated Cantonese speakers would rather use Cantonese syllables instead of Mandarin ones. (And I have seen claims that a Cantonese reading would probably be a tad closer to what he would have said than a Mandarin one.)

But both readings would be equally "right" -- because they would be equally wrong.  Because, well before 1400 CE no one knew any more what Sun Tzu would have uttered.   And today we still don't know; linguists have only vague guesses.   No one would understand what he said if he said it today. Or in 1400 CE.  His words were as lost as those of Proto-Indo-European are today.

His writings only let us recover the concepts that his words represented.  We trust that, where he wrote 水, he meant some word that, in his language, meant water.  But we don't know what that word was.  

The characters of The Art of War are arranged in a specific sequence that reflect  the syntax of whatever language Sun Tzu used in his writings.  (But with no punctuation, compounding hyphens, blank spaces, etc.)  Strictly speaking, we do not know how Sun Tzu would have parsed that text, and what was his intended meaning.  But there is a "generally accepted" specification of that syntax, the "Classical Chinese" syntax.  It  must be mostly correct, because many works from that time have been read according to that syntax, and massively commented, nonstop since then.  Likewise there is a "generally accepted" parsing and interpretation of the Chinese characters that comprise The Art of War, which is supported mainly by tradition and many old commentaries.  

(However, the syntax of Classical Chinese is inherently ambiguous, because it has no case or tense inflections, no articles, very few function words (prepositions copulas, etc.), and often a character may be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, etc.  Thus it is still possible that, here and there, the modern "generally accepted" parsing of the Art of War is wrong.  Like may be the the case for Genesis I.1)

But none of that matters for the Dictation Scenario.  The language that the "Divine Farmer" used when writing the Shennong Bencao, like that of Sun Tzu, died more than 1000 years ago. By 1400 CE, no one knew how he would have read his own book aloud.  The Dictator must have read it aloud to the Author, apparently character by character, using the syllables of whatever local language the Author spoke.  Even if the Dictator knew other languages, and could have read using the words of some other language, it would not make any sense -- because that is not what the Author wanted and asked him to do.

And while the syntax of Classical Chinese surely was very different from that of the local spoken language (just as it is from the syntax of modern Mandarin and Cantonese), that was not a big problem, because the SBJ (differently from the Art of War) has an extremely simple structure: each recipe is basically a list of diseases and benefits, mostly 2-4 characters each, mostly just adjective-noun or verb-object pairs.  No subordinate clauses, conditionals, temporal aspects, complicated logical connections, etc.   

The real big problem for the Author was that he must have recognized maybe only 5% of the plant names and 10% of the diseases, even if he could understand many of the words.  He may have understood the words for "rush" and "piglet", but he probably had no idea of what sort of medical condition a "rushing piglet" was.   But that did not matter either; his goal, according to the proposed scenario, was to just obtain a full copy of the SBJ that he could at least read, if not completely understand, when he got back home.

All the best, --stolfi