The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

It's funny being lectured on the reception of these texts because you've previously been pretty adamant that that shouldn't be a problem:

Since I can't read or speak any Chinese language, I cannot avoid the lalamos for extracting and translating the SBJ text.  Fortunately, every hanzi of the SBJ has been discussed in hundreds of scholarly papers and books, so they don't lack reliable sources (which Google AI cites).  And I routinely check the output of one lalamo against another, until they agree.  

And it's worth pointing out that a key part of the reason you trying to force a match with this text in particular is that you think it is so influential that anyone in the Chinese-speaking world---"Chinese" defined so broadly it includes places where the Chinese characters have never been inked by any large number of the literate populace---should have access to this text. As such, the reception of this text should be pretty transparent, as these things go. I've been focused on the linguistic side of this, but we can have a conversation about how your position about the reception of "chicken white grubs" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and yet you are repeating it. Your over-reliance on LLMs influences a number of your claims and misconceptions, and it is probably time to have that out. When I searched Google for sources discussing the reception of that passage, I mostly got links to this thread, so "you" appear to be the originator of it in English, at least

I would also like to point out that this is not true:

Classical Chinese is not a spoken language.  It is just a written language. More precisely, it is the set of the written languages of "classic" texts -- languages that, depending on where and when the texts were written, differ to a greater or lesser extent in their lexicon (hanzis, hanzi compounds, and their meanings) and grammar (how those lexemes can be combined, and the meaning of those combinations.

Again, I will reprint this quote, which you said was, "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.":

There is, admittedly, a special consideration in the case of written Chinese which might seem to put its glottographic status in doubt.  Once a spoken language has acquired a written form, the two linguistic systems may evolve independently so that the relationship between written and spoken languages becomes increasingly remote.  With Chinese this happened in a way for which I know no parallel:  during much of recent history, before the reforms in written usage associated with the May Fourth Movement initiated in 1919, the standard written language of China (wen yan, or literary Chinese) was a language which when read aloud in contemporary pronunciation could not be understood by a hearer, irrespective of how learned he might be, because the spoken equivalent of a written text did not contain sufficient information to determine the identities of the morphemes of which the text was composed.  There were two reasons for this.  Sound changes during the long period since the creation of the script had removed many phonological contrasts and thus introduced an extremely high incidence of homophony among morphemes;You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and developments in literary usage had created many possibilities of meaningfully combining morphemes in writing in ways that would never have occurred in spoken Chinese at any period of its history, thus reducing the chance of determining the intended morpheme among a set of homophone candidates by reference to its morphemic environment.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  Therefore literary Chinese not merely did only function but could only function as a written and read language, not as a spoken and heard language.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  This might seem to bring literary Chinese within the definition of semasiography.  But any literary Chinese text has a perfectly specific spoken form, composed of morphemes many of which occur in modern spoken Chinese and all of which are etymologically identifiable with morphemes that have occurred in spoken Chinese at some historical period:  there is a well-defined way of reading a literary Chinese text aloud (morphemes which are obsolete in spoken Chinese are given the pronunciations that result by applying subsequent sound-laws to the pronunciations the morphemes had when they were current in speech), even if this activity achieves no communicative purpose.  [...]  Chinese script is glottographic.

I notice I forgot to include the link the last time I repeated it, but it's from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Also, note I am referring to "wen yan" when I say "Classical Chinese"; he and Shira prefer to translate it "Literary Chinese", but we are talking about the same thing. (There are tradeoffs to each convention I can get into if anyone cares.) It cannot be ambiguous that we are talking about the same thing because it refers to the single written language of pre-modern China. 

So, the text in blue answers the issue here. There is a "perfectly specific" convention of reading Classical Chinese in any given time and place. (I understand that it won't always be Mandarin pinyin; indeed, you will notice which of us has been insistent on using Mandarin pinyin to illustrate more general claims.) The presence of a phonological transcription doesn't discriminate against a passage being Classical Chinese because Classical Chinese has never been without options phonological form. This passage also says phonological transcription of a text isn't necessarily inclusive of a text transliterated from Chinese characters being meaningful in phonological form because there is a commonly written language---Classical Chinese---for which a phonological transcription is expected to be inpenetrible. I doubt you still feel this is "presumably correct", would you like to actually address it?

Note that this is not true, and in part because the foregoing quote is:

If the local language were modern Mandarin, an Author moderately fluent in it would have recognized "jī zǐ" as the word for "egg" about just a easily as the Dictator recognized 鸡子.  

This example is live because You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. These two syllable don't typically appear next to each other to indicate the "chicken" meaning (from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and the "child" meaning (from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The character pair can be interpreted in Beijing Mandarin in a fowl sense, but as an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and only if read as "jīzi" instead. (This should answer the question about monotone, I hope.) Maybe the VMS is a different language with different considerations, but the claim here is wrong regardless, and it illustrates the perils of just assuming all Classical Chinese uses are preserved in modern languages. I am quite sure the other attested "jīzǐ" compound, 激子, was not current in 1400 given it's a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for "excitation", but it is the main way to parse "jīzǐ" now and the bigger point about how these sounds and senses get jostled around through time stands. So no, The Dictator would have had two usually decisive advantages on the The Author here, first that the characters would have eliminated a good deal of ambiguity and second that he would actually have learned the language where the compound in question exists and means what you claim it does.

Hence, you may not be aware that the fig leaf does not cover:

Again, the SPS=SBJ claim states that there is a mapping from the hanzi of the SBJ (as quoted in the ZHB) to the voynichese of the SPS, that appears to be mostly one-to-one for words and one-to-five for EVA characters.

The language that results from going character-by-character though Classical Chinese quotations is Classical Chinese, and you are demonstrating this over and over again with your examples. It is the Dictation Scenario, or at least the parts that I've flagged as wrong. That process does not result in a meaningful text.