The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[ololololo]

The Pirahã are a tiny tribe in a remote corner of the Amazon...

This linguist didn’t know the language from the outset; in fact, he learned it from scratch. We assume that the author of VMS learned conversational Chinese and could at least speak it poorly enough to come to the conclusion that he needed to write a book.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an excerpt of the Lewis and Clark diaries (1804). Note how Capt. Clark struggles to record phonetically the names of places and tribes and other terms in languages of which he has at best a very imperfect knowledge (including, apparently, the English one).

First, they knew what they were recording. They understood that they were recording the names of geographical places; they just didn’t know how to spell them correctly.
Secondly, for some reason they wrote the book in English, not in the language of those from whom they recorded these names.

These examples are interesting, but they don’t confirm anything.

On the contrary, that scenario is perfectly realistic.

Realistic, yes, but it has no real precedents (it all looks like a unique coincidence of all the strange events that led to the creation of a unique, strange book) and is unprovable.