The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And by that method we can also tell that the meaning of the hanzi 水 is mostly the same for any Chinese or Taiwanese native, namely "things, actions, and qualities that have to do with the substance that chemists denote by H2O, mainly in its liquid phase".  And that is roughly the meaning of that hanzi also for Japanese natives, and for many people in Southeast Asia, even if their native language and script are not at all related to the Chinese ones.

Two questions here: 1. Is it your contention that they are the same "things, actions, and qualities" in all languages?

Among speakers of all Chinese ("Sinitic") languages, mostly yes.  Although there can be sgnificant differences from person to person, more than from language to language.  Like, someone may know that, in some contexts, 水 may refer to ice or steam or sweat or lymph; whereas another person may know only uses of 水 where it refers to liquid water.

For speakers of other languages who may know that Hanzi, like Japanese, its general meaning may include some things would not be included for a Chinese speaker.

Is it your contention that there is no way to recover the words intended by the writer?

  

There is no way to know what the languages spoken in 300 BCE sounded like.  

We do not know that even for Latin or Greek, which used "phonetic" scripts since well before that.   Linguists believe that Latin "C" before "E" or "I" originally had the same "K" sound as before other vowels, but it changed to a "ch" or "s" sound by the time Vulgar Latin split into the Romance languages.  But they can't tell when that change happened, or whether it happened at different times in different parts of the Empire.

There are clues in the "phonetic" elements of compound Chinese characters, and in poetry manuals that list characters whose readings are said to rhyme; but those clues are only relative -- for example, they tell us that, when and where the hanzi for "star" was changed from 晶 to 星, it sounded somewhat like 生. But we do not know for sure what either sounded like, there and then.  Linguists have guesses, but they are far from certain.  

In fact, linguists know (from comments by writers of the time) that the languages of China were as diverse and mutually unintelligible as those of today, even though the same writing script was used by many of them.

All the best, --stolfi