The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Please don't think I'm just being emotional!

No problem at all, your skepticism is quite understandable. 

I'm just very mad at myself for missing the word '冬天' (Winter) ... even if I had guessed '冬天', I would have hit the same dead end you did in 2002. ... since you ruled out '冬天' 20 years ago, are you still looking at this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. symbol,

I am still convinced that those two symbols are upside-down Chinese characters, that went through at least two steps of copying by people who could not read them. The Scribe, in particular, probably never had seen Chinese writing in his life.  I don't see any other plausible explanation for their overall shapes and for  the details like the brush strokes simulated with a quill pen.   

But  don't know which were the original characters.  Maybe they were indeed 冬天.  But I understand why that guess has problems, so I would not bet $10 on that.  Same for the possible connection to the Bai medical tradition (involving homophone confusion or other errors).

the historical timeline (Ming Dynasty vs. Marco Polo's era)

The Ming xenophobic policies are a constraint that must be taken into account.  

One way to get aroud it is to assume that the Author was in China and got the dictation of the SBJ just before the Ming intensified bans on foreign traders and forced him to return to Europe.  If he was in China in 1375 when he was 20, he would be 75 in 1430, which is about the earliest that the C14 date allows for the transcription of his notes to vellum. 

But it seems that the Ming did not just expel all foreigners from China.  I understand that they only banned foreign traders, mostly in the coastal area; isn't that so? 

And Muslims were not included in the Ming ban, is that correct?  The qo="and" guess suggests that the Author's native language was Arabic or Hebrew...

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was a British explorer who disguised himself as a Muslim in order to visit Mecca around 1850.  Maybe the Author was an European who used that same trick to enter China around 1400.

Another possible solution to the Ming problem is that the dictation may have happened outside China, e.g. in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Tibet, etc. Or even in Korea or Japan: while their languages are not monosyllabic, when reading the SBJ a doctor in those countries probably would have read each hanzi as one syllable, in some pseudo-Chinese pronunciation.

All the best, --stolfi