The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

remain at a loss to give a fair, consistent explanation of the impetus for creating it. At a high level, I understand that it is supposed to be a workaround to writing the Chinese characters, and to record a dictation session or their phonetic value some other way. It is still not clear to me whether or not you think The Author understood the dictation, and you certainly think it is full of errors that you have supposed were due to the difficulties the author would have had telling words apart. Why create that kind of record?

What else could he have done?

All the people who have transcribed the VMS to digital files, starting with Friedman, never understood a single word of it.  So why did they do it?

The Zhenghe Bencao editors who copied the SBJ into their encylopedia already could not understand many parts of it. (Like those comments in the Rooster recipe about heads hung on the East gate, turning eggs into amber, and what were those "chicken white grubs".  And already could not identify several of the plants.)  

The archaeologists who copied cuneiform, hyeroglyphic, and many other ancient inscriptions generally did not undertand them either.  

The Medieval scholars who translated Arabic alchemy books into Latin surely could not understand much of them.