The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

On the other hand, someone who lived for a few years in any East Asian country should have been able to recognize al lot more spoken syllables and compounds if that recipe was read aloud in the local language, even if syllable by syllable.   He surely would have understood the parts in green below, and recognized the syllables in purple even if he could not recognize the compounds they were part of:

丹雄鸡味甘微温主女人崩中漏下赤白沃补虚温中止血通神杀毒辟不祥头主杀鬼东门上者尤良
肪主耳聋肠主遗溺肶胵裹黄皮主泄利屎白主消渴伤寒寒热翮羽主下血闭鸡子主除热火疮痫痉
可作虎魄神物鸡白蠹能肥脂生平泽

Again, because of homophone proliferation, words in Chinese cannot be recognized atomically on a syllable-by-syllable basis. Further, frequency and use of these vary by language and register, so even if you could make this claim, it would need to be bounded to the particular language. And even if bounded to the language of the text, Classical Chinese no one by 1400 could recognize most of the syllables there because phonetic Classical Chinese served no communitive purpose.

And again, the character correspondence between the unnamed language and Classical Chinese, provided it even exists, would be based on etymology, not meaning. And while there are obvious transference benefits there if you learn the characters, that is very different from claiming someone could distinguish frequent homophones by ear in a totally different language by guessing 2000 year old etymological relationships. (Not for nothing, this is the Latin Mass problem in Italy, if Italian were full to the gills with homophones.)

I know you think you can just say the Dictation Scenario is totally separable from SPS=SBJ, but you must then actually separate them for that to matter. I long ago said the Dictator/Author setup to be the feasible part, recall; it is the claims about how someone would interface with the phonology that I have been "fixated" on, to use your term. When you keep bringing up that there is some way to voice the characters that results in a hearer understanding the syllables as a means to understand a Classical Chinese text, you are smuggling elements of the Dictation Scenario into your arguments for why the VMS text is the way it is, and hence SPS = SBJ. (I might also ask who has the "fixation" with this idea, because I sure would have dropped it by now if you actually had.) The first sentence in the pull quote above is a key part of your Dictation Scenario. If you are unwilling to let that go, it doesn't matter you define your terms, my objection is located on those claims. I am not being unreasonable or failing to understand your terminological framework when I continue to object to these spurious claims.