05-10-2026, 12:47 AM
(04-10-2026, 06:10 PM)rikforto wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A reading is a conventionalized way of assigning sound and meaning bundles to text. I am going to engage with this speculatively soon enough, but there is no convention for reading Chinese characters in Spanish. Claims about how someone would read them "in Spanish" require inventing a literary culture that does not exist, has never existed, and if we speculate existed we have no direct data for.
Well, you see, I am assuming that the Dictator had a functioning brain. A device that had been invented a few centuries before, and I gather was in widespread use in China and adjacent countries by the time when that scenario is supposed to have happened.
So, when the Dictator saw the character 鸡, he did NOT say whatever @rickforto and his army of linguists say he categorically should have said to stay within the sacred bounds of the literary culture bla bla bla bla.
He would have said the word for "chicken" in the local language.
Because he knew that that is what the Author needed, and had asked for. He knew that if he had read out the SBJ in Middle Mandarin or in whatever was the local pseudo-Chinese they normally used, it would be the same as reading it in Yakut or Proto-Basque or Etruscan -- it would have made the effort totally pointless.
Why is that so hard to understand?
By the way, I don't recall whether you ever answered this question: do you really believe that the sounds that the scholars would have uttered when reading the SBJ aloud in 1400 CE were the same sounds that the author of the SBJ would have uttered if he was asked to read his book aloud, in ~300 BCE?