The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Does the idea of the omission of certain sections make sense with the rest of your theory? I'm under the impression that the VMS text is supposed to represent the spoken SBJ written phonetically.

That the "Nature", "Another name", and "Provenance" fields were omitted is pretty clear from the matching results.  

How the SBJ was turned into the SPS is still a matter of conjecture.  My best guess is that "Dictation Scenario" I have described before.  Namely, the Author lived in "China" (short for "some East Asian country") for a few years, enough to learn the local spoken language to a level good enough for practical purposes.

There he also learned about all those books with stuff that was quite different from what was known in Europe.  Like the Zenghe Bencao (ZHB) materia medica, compiled in ~1100 CE -- 26 volumes, over 1000 pages, listing over 1700 remedies, with extensive commentaries from various other medical books going back to 300 BCE. 

Thus my guess is that he decided to copy and bring back to Europe some of that knowledge. Since he could understand the spoken language to some extent, but had no hope of learning the Chinese characters, his only option was to get some literate local, preferably a medical doctor, to read the book aloud; while he recorded what he said in a phonetic aphabet or shorthand that he devised for the purpose.

Copying the whole ZHB was of course out of the question.  I suppose that he discussed his plan with local doctors, and on their advice settled for copying only the Shennong Bencao part of the ZHB.  That was still regarded as the foundation of their medical science. It had only ~365 terse entries, each with a list of diseases but no other commentaries, and thus would be less than 13 pages long.

In that negotiation, of just after he started the project, he may have realized that it would a waste of time and paper to copy certain parts of the SBJ itelf.  Like those three fields above.  Like the comment in the "Five clays" entry,  五石脂各随五色补五脏 = "The five clays, each according to the five colors, tonify the five solid organs."

So he probably told the Dictator to skip those three fields, and he himself omitted any comment that he did understand and felt that it was pointless to copy.

Or maybe he did copy the whole SBJ, with all those fields and comments; but removeed them when, back in Europe, he prepared the final draft for the Scribe.

Therefore, those omissions imply three possibilities (sub possibilities can be "and/or"):

[Maybe]the source SBJ text was already lacking those sections.

If the copying happened in the area of strong Chinese influence, the source for the dictation was almost certainly a printed edition of the ZHB, which included those fields as part of the original SBJ material.

However, the Dictation Scenario may have happened in some other country, like Vietnam, where the doctors considered the SBJ the foundation of their medicine.  Then they may have been using some local medical encyclopedia, instead of the ZHB; and those fields may have been omitted in that version.  But I don't know whether such alternative encyclopedias even existed. 

[Maybe]the VMS author strongly understood the spoken language when respoken aloud later, enough to be certain which sections were which.

If the Author lived for several years in the country, he must have been able to understand at least half of the words that the Dictator pronounced -- even if he could not identify most of the plants, medical conditions, or benefits.  He must have understood all three words 味甘平 = "flavor sweet balanced", and must have quickly learned what they meant and that recording them would be pointless.  Ditto for 生山谷 = "grows mountain valley".  

I don't understand how you know which sections were apparently omitted, or how you know why. I'm getting the impression that these omissions are having to be included because the VMS was not matching to the original SBJ text as hoped.

Yes. 

Again, the first strong evidence that the SPS could be a transcription of the SBJ  was the good match between the distributions of SBJ recipe lengths and SPS parag lengths.  The Red Rooster recipe and the f105v.32 parag were distant outliers in both distributions, so, if the SPS was indeed the SBJ, those two items should correspond to each other.  Eventually I figured out that 主 corresponded to daiin or close variants thereof: their positions matched not only in that recipe but in many others.  

But, while the gaps between consecutive 主 and consecutive daiin-likes matched, the gaps before the first daiin and after the last one were always way too short.  For example, in the full Rooster recipe, there are 7 hanzi (丹雄鸡味甘微温) before the first 主.  At the average rate of ~5 EVA per hanzi, one would expect 35 EVA letters before the first daiin.  But there are only 8 EVA letters there (poar.keeo).  The difference of 27 letters is not negligible.  

But with the assumpton that the 味... field is always omitted, there are ont 3 hanzi (丹雄鸡 = "red male chicken") before the first 主.  The expected number of EVAs before the first daiin then drops to 15.  The actual 8 is still too short, but only by 7 EVA letters.

Maybe poar.keeo is actually 3 words shorter than average, or keeo" is a single word like "rooster" that means "male chiken". Or maybe the Author understood enough of the entry to realize that the title should be just "male chicken", since the "red" iwas just Chinese color superstition.

If so, this may be an issue when trying to validate this theory, because these paragraphs are no longer being matched with the SBJ as written, but instead being matched with a version that has been altered until a match occurs.

Indeed this is an obstacle on the way to convincing others.  

But, again, there are very few ad-hoc (recipe-specific) omissions.  Those three fields are assumed to be omitted from all entries; and obviously it would make no sense for the Author to transcribe them -- if he had even a vague idea of what they meant.  The few ad-hoc omissions often are at the end of the recipe, so they do not affect the gaps between the keys.

Compare this puzzle to the decipherment of ancient languages.  Even when there is a "Rosetta Stone", the two texts are often only approximate translations.  Does that mean that any decipherment based on them is bogus?

All the best, --stolfi