The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[nablator]

I should try a similar one: post an audio clip in some language and ask for a volunteer who does not know how to write that language to try to write down the sounds they hear, using whatever spelling system they chooses, and then see how consistent the result was. Namely, if they always wrote the same word in the same way.

There is no limit to how garbled the text can get if the volunteer is unfamiliar with the language. I heard tourists, probably from Southeast Asia (my guess), talk yesterday and I thought: I have no idea how I would write (phonetically) what I just heard.

The hypothesis that a text is written in an awful semi-phonetic, inconsistent version of some Asian language is therefore unfalsifiable.