The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

So, I want to focus on one thing for this post. This is what I wrote about the character 水:

On the merits, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is not the example I would choose because, without triggering a debate about the rigor of glottochronology, the broad observation that common words tend to be more stable holds for Sinitic languages and 水 is very common. Nonetheless, it illustrates my point well enough. In Cantonese it has gained a sense of "money" that is not available in other languages. In Japanese and Korean it retains its old, alchemical sense in the compound meaning "[edit:Wednesday]" and in that use was one of the few hanja I encountered in daily life when I lived in Korea; from what I can tell, it is no longer current in any Chinese language. But most to the point, in a few Wu languages the word for water has been supplanted by 沝. This is not simply an orthographic convention. In both Mandarin and the Wu languages in question the words have different meanings and readings. Mostly 沝 is obsolete in Mandarin, but it meant "river confluence" or the like and is still collated in Mandarin dictionaries, but in the relevant Wu languages it has simply taken on the meaning "water" and supplanted 水. To be absolutely clear: 水 and 沝 are not homophonous or synonymous in Mandarin; in the same way 水 and 沝 are not homophonous or synonymous in these Wu languages. However, Mandarin 水 is synonymous with Suichang Wu 沝; Mandarin 沝 is not synonymous with Suichang Wu 沝. Mandarin 沝 and Suichnag Wu 沝 will admittedly be homophonous if one does not use different pronunciation standards for both languages, but this is a tautology that tells us nothing about usage and meaning. That Chinese more readily admits that sort of homophonous reading schemes does not grant Chinese speakers an exception from language change, as the lexical and synonym entries for 水 readily show.

And this is the most recent statement about that character:

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.  

Just, absolutely no recognition I showed that we can recover the actual word, nor that it 水 does not always mean water, nor that not all languages use the word 水 for water. He's not saying I'm wrong, he's not saying that I misunderstand my source, he's not saying it's irrelevant. Just repeating this point with no recognition that I already addressed it. And does kind of seem to me like I if I go and look up if this word is actually attested the way Jorge describes, and it is not attested that way, that the conversation should reflect that.

Now, maybe the problem is actually me. After all, trying to explain all that in a paragraph---and a paragraph where I brain-farted on first-month of Korean class vocabulary no less!---might simply be confusing. So I am going to go and take the time to write something about how to actually read characters, why they work the way they do, how we know that, and the two ways it bears on the dictation scenario and the putative identification of the VMS text. But that will take me a more than a minute to put up there