The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

what the first character of the next word is depends mainly on semantics ... "remote effect" in Chinese [comes from] is grammatical structure, with clear semantic boundaries.

As I pointed out in my previous message, the point is that there are marked short- and long-range non-trivial statistical dependencies between hanzi in Chinese texts, including in the Shennong Bencao.  

Yes they are due to semantics: common multiple-hanzi phrases that may or may not be tied to the topic of the text, and common grammatical constructs. And that is why those "remote effects" are seen in the VMS, even in other sections besides the SPS.

Tone sandhi: Chinese has tone sandhi for "一" (yi) and "不" (bu), but this is strictly limited to the immediately following syllable (adjacent), and is absolutely never affected by prefixes several words prior (such as the hypothetical affixes "sh", "ch").

Wikipedia says that tone sandhi in Mandarin is much more pervasive.  In addition to those two cases,

• When there are two 3rd tones in a row, the first one becomes 2nd tone. E.g. 你好 (nǐ + hǎo > ní hǎo)You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is pronounced at different pitches depending on what tone it follows.
  

Are these statemenrs wrong?

And I read somewhere that the first rule applies to multiple syllables. That is, nǚ zǐ rǔ would be pronounced nǘ zí rǔ.  Is that true?

Even these tone sandhi effects between adjacent syllables could explain "remote effects" in a phonetic transcription, depending on how tones are encoded.  

In the "numeric" version of pinyin (also used for Cantonese jyutping and other phonetic systems for other languages), the tone is indicated by a digit at the end of the letter.  Thus the Wikipedia rules above would be

• A syllable that would normally end with '3'  changes its ending to '2'  if the next syllable ends in '3'. 
  
• For certain common syllables, their final digit will be the same as that of the previous syllable.
  

The position of the tone digit in this version of pinyin is arbitrary.  It could be placed at the start of the syllable, or anywhere inside it, and it would still be understood.  And the placement would not have to be consistent.  Thus the "remote effect" could be between the syllable-initial symbols rather than syllable-final symbols;

But there is another way to encode Mandarin tones, which is to assign digits 1-3 to pitch levels (low, medium, high) and use them to indicate the tone profile.  For example, hǎo could be written 2ha1o3 (or 213hao, or ha213o, or any of many other ways).  

In this notation, one can also omit the pitch digits when they don't change. For example fú zhī qīng shēn bù could be written 1fu3 2zhi qing shen2 3bu1 or even 1fu3 zhi qing shen 3bu1  I suspect that the Vounichese letters a, o, y may be encoding tones this way.

In this notation, tone sandhi can have effect over several syllables. 

Counter-evidence: If a Chinese text describing different plants has character sequence statistics that do not vary with the type of plant (semantic content), but are strongly constrained by prefixes like "sh", "ch", "k", etc., spanning multiple characters to determine the probability of the subsequent "q(o)", then this book is absolutely not a natural language botanical monograph, but can only be an encrypted text or generated pseudo-text.

See again the first recommendation in my previous post... 

does this "remote effect" mean the clue "daiin = 主" is completely dead too?

As explained above, definitely not. 

But note that not every daiin means 主, just as not every "shi" means teacher (or stone, or lion, or whatever).  

It is the other way around: as far as  I have checked, a 主 in the SBJ corresponds in the SPS to a daiin or one of its few recognized variants.

All the best, --stolfi