The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

This has been a fairly contentious issue:

He kept to his plan only because he could understand many of the words as they were spoken, and thus hoped that he would be able to understand at least some of his phonetic transcript when he went back to Europe.

At one point I was flatly shouted down for suggesting that this means the languages are mutually intelligible:

The mutual intelligibility of the written Sinitic languages is a key assumption of your entire understanding of the COT.

NO IT IS NOT.  It is absolutely irrelevant to it.

Granting that this may be partial intelligibility, the crux of the matter is unchanged! If you can speak one language and be understood in another, that is mutual intelligibility! It is a central assumption here, and certainly not "absolutely irrelevant".

We've since had someone with actual field expertise weigh in:

It is worse with Literary Chinese, where the phonology is decidedly unhelpful in understanding the text. This would be a trilingual endeavour between the speaker's topolect (Mandarin, in your assumption, I believe?), Literary Chinese prose (which has diverged considerably in grammar and is not readily understood by a listener), and the scribe. Dictating this isn't unheard of (e.g. Ministers would dictate Literary Chinese-medium messages to the Emperor, and the Hongwu Emperor did engage in this), but it is not considered realistic for anyone but the most educated of Chinese. It is hard to express just how important the characters themselves are in disambiguating Literary Chinese, lest you get lost in 其/期/齐/奇, 工/公/功/攻/宫/弓, or something like that. It is less ambiguous in Middle Mandarin, but still an extremely unusual situation. 

I think you may be missing the important point here:

yet not know characters. Shennong Bencao is Literary Chinese and being able to recite it and understand its contents means knowing the characters, or the spoken word would be nonsense.

The Dictator would of course be able to read the characters.  The premise of the Dictation Scenario is that the VMS Author could not read the characters, but had some level of fluency in the spoken language only. 

The point is that the characters cannot be extricated from the words meaningfully. Positing a "Dictator" to do the extrication "would be nonsense".

This next quote from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. requires some introduction because it uses unusual technical terms. First, glottographic, defined, "using visible marks to represent forms of a spoken language". This is contrasts with, second, semasiographic, which is more akin to what you posited when you suggested that characters record ideas directly: "visible marks to meaning directly without reference to any specific spoken language". He makes pretty plain that Classical Chinese is unusual for its relationship to spoken language:

There is, admittedly, a special consideration in the case of written Chinese which might seem to put its glottographic status in doubt.  Once a spoken language has acquired a written form, the two linguistic systems may evolve independently so that the relationship between written and spoken languages becomes increasingly remote.  With Chinese this happened in a way for which I know no parallel:  during much of recent history, before the reforms in written usage associated with the May Fourth Movement initiated in 1919, the standard written language of China (wen yan, or literary Chinese) was a language which when read aloud in contemporary pronunciation could not be understood by a hearer, irrespective of how learned he might be, because the spoken equivalent of a written text did not contain sufficient information to determine the identities of the morphemes of which the text was composed.  There were two reasons for this.  Sound changes during the long period since the creation of the script had removed many phonological contrasts and thus introduced an extremely high incidence of homophony among morphemes;You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and developments in literary usage had created many possibilities of meaningfully combining morphemes in writing in ways that would never have occurred in spoken Chinese at any period of its history, thus reducing the chance of determining the intended morpheme among a set of homophone candidates by reference to its morphemic environment.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  Therefore literary Chinese not merely did only function but could only function as a written and read language, not as a spoken and heard language.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  This might seem to bring literary Chinese within the definition of semasiography.  But any literary Chinese text has a perfectly specific spoken form, composed of morphemes many of which occur in modern spoken Chinese and all of which are etymologically identifiable with morphemes that have occurred in spoken Chinese at some historical period:  there is a well-defined way of reading a literary Chinese text aloud (morphemes which are obsolete in spoken Chinese are given the pronunciations that result by applying subsequent sound-laws to the pronunciations the morphemes had when they were current in speech), even if this activity achieves no communicative purpose.  [...]  Chinese script is glottographic.

Positing someone to do dictation or hollowly asserting that "The Author" could understand the same does not resolve the problem here.