The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[chenxiang]

Dear Professor Stolfi,

Thank you for the detailed explanation about the Red Rooster and the "qo" prefix. I understand your point that in Chinese, lists are often written without conjunctions, and the author might have added "qo" to make the transcription easier to parse.

However, this brings us back to the paradox that you yourself acknowledged in the previous post. If the author was capable of parsing the Chinese text to the point where he felt the need to add "and" (qo) to clarify the structure, he must have understood the syntax quite well.

If he understood the syntax, why would he spell "主" in four different ways (daiin, kaiin, laiin, dain) in the SAME short recipe?

In my understanding of Classical Chinese, "主" is a very basic, frequently used character. It is not a rare character that would be easily misheard. If it was just a "phonetic transcription" of an unfamiliar sound, why did he always omit "味" and "生", which are also very common characters in these recipes?

I am not denying the statistical alignment you found. But I am genuinely worried that the assumptions we are making (systematic omission, flexible spelling variations, added conjunctions) are becoming too many. When a theory needs this many ad-hoc rules to work, it becomes hard to prove it to the academic community.

I am still reading the 86 pages and will keep looking for Chinese sources that might help.

Best regards,
Chenxiang