The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

dān xióng jī: zhǔ: (nǚ rén) bēng zhōng, lòu
xià, chì bái wò. bǔ xū, wēn zhōng, zhǐ xuè,
tōng shén, shā dú, bì bù xiáng. tóu: zhǔ: shā
guǐ. fáng: zhǔ: ěr lóng. cháng: zhǔ: yí nì.
pí chī guǒ huáng pí: zhǔ: xiè lì. niào bái:
zhǔ: xiāo kě, shāng hán hán rè. hé yǔ: zhǔ:
xià xuè bì. jīzǐ: zhǔ: chú rè huǒ chuāng,
diān jìng; kě zuò: hǔ pò.

Again, this assumes homophone disambiguation, which is the entire ballgame here.

For instance, it is true that 雄 is read xióng and that 雄 means male in certain contexts, but it does not follow that xióng readily means "male". It can You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. indicate any of 熊, 胼, 赨, or 能, which each have their own meanings. It is likewise true that 雞/鸡 can be read as jī, but it does not follow that jī is "chicken". It can be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 丌, 乩, 僟/仉, 兵, 出, 刉, 刏, 剞, 勣/?, 叽, 吂, 咭, 唢, 唧, 喞, 喫/吃, 嗘, 嘰/叽, 圼, 基, 墼, 奅, 奇, 姫, 姬, 尐, 局, 屐, 峜, 嵆, 嵇, 嵞, 幽, 幾/几, 憮/怃, 擊/击, 攪/搅, 朞, 期, 机, 枅, 棇, 樍, 機/机, 檯/台, 激,  犄, 璣/玑, 畸, 畿, 磯/矶, 禨/?, 积, 稘, 稽, 積/积, 笄, 筓, 箕, 簊, 綾/绫, 緑/绿, 績/绩, 缁, 羁, 羇, 羈/羁, 耭, 聻/?, 肌, 脐, 芨, 菾, 蘂/蕊, 虀, 虮, 蛣, 襀/?, 覉, 覊, 覘/觇, 觭, 諅, 譏/讥, 譤, 讥, 賫/赍, 賷/赍, 赍, 跡/迹, 跻, 踐/践, 踥, 蹟/迹, 躋/跻, 躸, 迹, 銈/?, 錤/?, 鐖/?, 鑇/?, 鑙, 隒, 隮/?, 雞/鸡, 鞿/?, 韲, 飢/饥, 饑/饥, 饥, 鰿/?, 鳮, 鷄/鸡, 麡/?, 齄, 齎/赍, 齏/齑, 齑, or 几.

One must wonder, then, how a Mandarin speaker copes. Well, part of knowing Mandarin is knowing which syllables go together. One must simply recognize that xióng next to jī is rooster, and the basic strategy there is how Old Chinese went from being monosyllabic to Mandarin being largely polysyllabic. However, that basic strategy only works if "xióng jī" actually means rooster. The problem is that the great majority of Chinese languages do not use 雄雞 as rooster, including most varieties of Mandarin, including the spoken prestige varieties in Beijing and Nanjing.

This also wreaks havoc on deciding which words to even parse. Yes, 血 at least has remained fairly stable in meaning and use as these things go, but there are other, unrelated words pronounced xuè, and some appear in compounds. Should you be parsing "zhǐ xuè" or "xuè" or "xuè tōng"? What happens when you guess wrong? Even assuming all the green words before to be recognizable, a fact already demonstrated false, there's a huge amount of lost context in the black words by that point. This may not be so bad for xuè in this exact context, but for every green word? Bearing in mind that the parsing may simply not exist in "the local language"?

I cannot stress enough for you and people reading this---that text printed there is not Mandarin Chinese. It is Classical Chinese transcribed from a Mandarin pronunciation of the characters; it has the same status that Ecclesiastical Latin has as Italian, except if it were impossible for even modern-day Latin speakers to understand Latin mass. To this point, I will give Shira the last word:

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 consierably 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.