The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

He would need to just be able to recognize those hanzi.

I myself don't know any Chinese language and I can't read written Chinese.  For the latter,I would have to know the shape and meanings of at least a thousand hanzi, and thousands of compounds thereof.  But I know a few dozen hanzi from the time I studied Japanese.  I can recognize those keywords and easily delete those fields.  In fact, my program does that automatically, with only a couple of python lines.

This doesn't make sense. If he knew a few hanzi, he was by definition able to read and understand the classical text to a certain, limited degree. And you say some fields were quite complicated to understand, but that the VMS author understood enough to both recognise the beginning/end of such sections AND that he knew enough about the content to make a judgement call on whether to include it?

This fundamentally means that someone had to have taught him the relevant characters and that he must have had certain sections explained to him in detail. The fact that some of the medicinal traditions were foreign to him seems to me to not be a good reason to leave those things out. I thought the entire point was to record information about this newly discovered medicine from the east.

But a sensible Dictator would, at the very least, have used intonation to hint at the parsing.

A sensible dictator would surely just read a sentence in his mind and then slowly orate the correct information in his local language one word at a time, instead of slowly transliterating into an incorrect mess. That dictator would also be hearing himself incorrectly say "red male chicken, flavor sweet  slightly warm, main, woman person burst inside drip", and would surely say to the VMS author "hey, you know this makes no sense writing it this way, right? I can just tell you what it says"

I do not see the need for a symbol by symbol method at all. The translation method would be far more useful to the VMS author as he would have an entirely coherent set of information which would actually be useful if people were to go back and communicate with the same people again.  

Anyway, writing down those fields (or copying them to vellum) would have been a waste of time if the Author and/or the intended readers were not knowledgeable in Chinese medical theory (or did not believe in it).

Okay, not including the parts at the end with bigger characters etc is actually a great example of why someone wouldn''t consider copying it. That makes sense to me. 

However, stating what would and would not have been a waste of time is -at best- completely and totally arbitrary. For all we know, the VMS author was the leading world expert on foreign medicine and wanted to know all of the weirdest stuff the most. The only reason this is being put forward is as a justification for removing certain parts of the SBJ. 

I would wager that if the tables were turned, and the matches were only good when including the full text, you would be here justifying exactly why he would want to copy it all. 

Honestly, the far more upfront way of doing this would be to drop the theories / justifications for the removal process entirely and simply say that the SPS matches a heavily altered and trimmed SBJ text. I would more readily accept "I have no idea why the SBJ would have been heavily altered, but the SPS matches it" than hypotheticals on what someone chose 600 years ago.

Talking about these other theories is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.