The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Interesting that the first word in f114r.4 "fdeechdy" occurs only once in the manuscript, but "feng zi" occurs multiple times in the recipe. I suppose that could be down to the specific dialect/language not using the same sounds when referring to the hornet or wasp larvae.

Yes, IF the "Bee Larva" entry of the SBJ is among the 243 SPS parags (67%) that I can use, AND parag f114r.4 is the correct one, AND the cribs I have got so far have been correctly located in it, THEN the translations of the names of the sub-entries would probably be

•  蜂子 = fdeechdy.opche = bee larva
  
• 大黄蜂子 = okchedy.daiiin.chedy =  giant hornet larva
  
• 土蜂子 = dkchs.aiin.chdedy = ground-nesting wasp larva
  

Even with the assumptions above there is some uncertainty about the edges of those translations.  

For instance, the daiin after the third heading is actually qodaiin, so the qo could be part of the third heading too.  But I am increasingly convinced that qo- is a prefix that means "and", and was inserted either by the Author or by the Dictator to make the recipe easier to parse.  

And the opche in the first heading may be some extra word, like "the honey kind" or "it is", that is not a translation of either of the two hanzi.  Or maybe opchedaiin is a more verbose translation of 主, like "main uses" instead of just "mainly".  Or maybe the second word should have been opched but the final d got (con)fused with the initial d of daiin.

But it is encouraging that all three headings have similar substrings: chdy (or ched), chedy, chdedy.

All the best, --stolfi