The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

At one point we went around on this for awhile and the reason you are saying "things" is because you acknowledged that the interpretation of them as degrees was untenable in 1400.

I call them "things" because I do not know what those 30 labels+nymphs+stars represent. They could be Babylonian degrees of arc. They could be the 30 nymphs that preside each sign.  They could be the 30 girls that the Author planned to sleep with in each Zodiac period as soon as his mom would let him get out on his own.

We already went through that issue and it would be pointless to resume that discussion.  You can say that I still have no idea of whether the Chinese divided each of the 24 solar term intervals any further.  If they did, I don'k know how many parts went into each interval.  Thus I don't know what Chinese concept the 15 VMS nymphs would correspond to (but it could not have been those "Chinese degrees".)

But what the VMS nymphs represent is not important.  The important point is that the earliest pages of the VMS Zodiac -- Aries and Taurus -- apparently assumed a division of the Ecliptic into 24 equal "sectors".  Like the Chinese "solar terms", and unlike the common European scheme (a division of the year into 12 signs of slightly variable length in days)

What else could he have done?

Nothing is very much an option here

I don't get your logic.  

"Do nothing" was also very much an option for Shakespeare when he considered whether he should write Hamlet.  It would have saved him a lot of hard work.  Does it follow that it is unlikely that he wrote it? Or that it is unlikely that Hamlet ever got written?

The SPS was written.  It strongly resembles a phonetic transcription of the SBJ.

[The Author gave up] has an immense amount of explanatory power for why you cannot get a consistent correspondence between the two texts!

Except that I do get lots of correspondences -- which I would not get if the SPS was not a transcription of the SBJ.

There is a distinction to be had here between the linguistic difficulties you've been leaning on, that the hypothetical Author could not distinguish between words in spoken Chinese, and the kind of cultural reception these examples seem to reference, such as not knowing the exact context of hanging a rooster head on a gate. Your exposition might be providing clarity that is not in the text, but it seems like the text is understood from the way you are talking about it.

I don't get your point here. But the measurements strongly indicate that the Author did omit all the "flavor", "provenance", and "another name" fields from all entries, and the "amber is divine" and "hung chicken heads" and "chicken white grubs" comments from the "red rooster" recipe.  It would be silly for him to include those parts in his transcription; don't you agree?