The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[chenxiang]

Professor, in my view, your research has somewhat turned into an "ad hoc hypothesis."

In science, this is called "constantly patching a theory in order to save it":

At first, it was merely the "Chinese theory."

When inconsistencies were found, you added "the system omits 味 and 生."

When the spellings were inconsistent, you added "daiin/kaiin/laiin are scribal errors."

When the sentence structure was incomprehensible, you added "qo is 'and.'"

When the spellings of high-frequency words were chaotic, you added "it may be a dialect or Vietnamese."

In my view, with every patch added, the theory becomes one point harder to falsify, but at the same time its credibility decreases by one point.

A truly correct theory should be one that "maps the letters of the VMS to specific sounds, reads out complete sentences, and is immediately understood by Sinologists around the world," rather than relying on a programmer's "badness scoring."

This is my perhaps somewhat immature view; I am just guessing, because I am only 16 years old, and my perspective may not be as far-sighted as that of you scholars or professors. I have been trying hard to improve.

Please allow me to complain a little: your thinking moves too fast, but I am trying hard to catch up. Relatively speaking, however, my thinking and reply speed is much slower compared with yours, so my responses may lag somewhat. Please forgive me.