The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

[Everett] didn’t know the [Pirahã] 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.

But the Author in the Dictation Scenario too learned the local language from scratch.  There were no schools or tutorials for foreigners...

[Lewis and Clark] 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 ... they wrote the book in English, not in the language of those from whom they recorded these names.

The bulk of their diary is their observations, not natives' speeches, so of course it was in their own language.   

But those Native American names were not "meaningless" strings (like the European names, mostly taken from the Bible or inherited from remote antiquity).  They generally were phrases in the local language, like "Running Bison" or "Broken Canoe River".  

The point of the example is that L&C recorded those names phonetically.  They gave  the translation when they knew it somehow, but left some names untranslated.

[The Dictation Scenario is] realistic, yes, but it has no real precedents

You seem to be demanding another instance of the Dictation Scenario that produced another surviving manuscript just like the VMS.   

Sorry, but history is full of examples of unique events which resulted in unique (surviving) artifacts.  Like the Phaistos disk, the Antikithera calculator, the Rodia Towers, the Dead Sea War Scroll, Oetzi's mummy, the Kaaba, Nan Madol...

Are you familiar with Marco Polo's travels?  Even if he did only 1/10 of what he reported, it would be much more unlikely than what the Dictation Scenario proposes.

All the best, --stolfi