The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Alright, a few more because I'm really not trying to strawman you but I am genuinely struggling to understand why you are making some of the distinctions you are making, more than the what of them.

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.

So is the idea here that the differences are idiolectic, that is unique to different speakers? And if yes, what is the shared "mental geography" and "idea space" you referred to above that is apparently is the same for all speakers?

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.

Can I infer from this that your statements about the differences between different varieties of Chinese is entirely based on phonological differences?