11-10-2026, 01:41 PM
(10-10-2026, 01:25 PM)rikforto wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
The following has nothing to do with the COT, the SPS=SBJ claim, or the Dictation scenario, but is about a misconception that seems necessary to clearup:
Surely some Chinese scholars will claim that their parsing and interpretation of classical texts never changed, in spite of pronunciation changes; so that what they think that the Analects or the Dao mean is precisely what Confucius and Lao Tse meant. But that is religious (or almost-religious) dogma, not fact.
That may be sort of somewhat true for texts that have been continuously read and commented for the last N centuries. The way modern scholars interpret them now is probably very close to how scholars did N centuries ago.
But for texts that were hardly read and commented, including newly discovered old texts, the modern parsing and interpretation may be way off from what the authors intended. And ditto for texts that do not have such a continuous trail of scholarly comments extending all the way back to their creation. The modern parsing will often be incorrect, and the modern interpretation of words and grammatical constructs will often be wrong.
There are plenty of examples of incorrect parsing and interpretation in the "scholarly consensus reading" of ancient Western texts. Even of the very first word of Genesis, it seems.
Even in that Rooster recipe, it seems that Chinese medical scholars themselves are somewhat uncertain about how to parse the phrase 鸡白蠹, and they do not seem to know its meaning.
"Wait, what did you just say -- "he ate a camel and a turtle"?? Is that how you read my 其食駱駝龜 in that future where you said you are from? No, no, no! I meant "he was eating a camel's hump"! See, "turtle" is how people here in in the 鳥不拉屎的地方 Province call the hump of a camel. And "camel's hump" is the name of a steamed bun with egg and dates filling. Don't you eat them any more?"
All the best, --stolfi