The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

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".  

Now here is an example of why I find this problematic. Why is "flavor sweet balanced" or "grows mountain valley" a pointless thing to record? They are quite important pieces of infomation actually; they are the information needed to find and identify the object being described. In fact, if the VMS was ever to be useful to future travellers, its actually amongst the most important pieces of information to record!  

Like, why are those pieces of information any more pointless to a european audience than "this foreign, unknown thing reduces fever"? I would have thought some of the objects described in the SBJ were also found in certain parts of europe too.

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.

These are two very different possibilities with two different sets of assumptions, as I laid out in my message. If the premise is that there were omissions, there should be some reasonable underpinning logic to how and why the omissions occured. To be clear, you are removing parts of the SBJ text based on your interpretation of the exact motivations, frame of mind, and abilities of a theoretical unknown traveller 600 years ago. Those variables are different depending on which scenario above you choose. 

The methodology on this just seems a little shaky, honestly. The entire original foundation of this theory was that there was a word match between the SPS and SBJ, and that the general wordcount and distribution of words of both works correlated in some way. But now that it seems that this is apparently not the case, the original content has to be constantly altered to create matches. Where is the line where this becomes unreasonable? 

If you omit the sections and the matches somewhat improve, but still don't convincingly match, what will change next? Will the order of the text start getting changed to create word matches? Every alteration you make lowers the validity of the match, so they should be done extremely sparingly in my view. I'm concerned that this will reach a conclusion analogous to: "look, the square peg does fit in the triangle hole! (if you cut the corners and shave it down and force it through)". 

And by the way, I say concerned because i've been genuinely interested in this theory, and I think it could have merit in some way (I disagree on many specifics, but find it plausible that the SBJ could have been copied in some way) and I would love to see it be proven if it's true. I just think there is a potential slippery slope here.