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The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

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• The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  ololololo > 10-06-2026, 03:12 PM

  (10-06-2026, 12:11 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (10-06-2026, 06:42 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (10-06-2026, 02:21 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But, if the local language was any of the 50 dialects of Chinese, the Dictator would read each character as a syllable in that language.

  I understand this. The problems I have raised are a direct consequence of taking a Classical Chinese text and dictating it this way

  Sorry, I don't understand what problems you are referring to.

  • The Dictator reads the SBJ aloud in Cantonese.
    
  • The Author writes down the Cantonese (which he speaks) in a phonetic notation.
    
  • Author goes back to Europe.
    
  • Author reads the Cantonese and understand it (minus technical terms).
    

  What is wrong here?
  
  Do you mean the syntax?  You have seen examples of recipes: there is hardly any syntax in them.  The most complicated sentences are like "lengthens life", "releases blocked blood", "cough from reversed qi", ...
  
  All the best, --stolfi

  Why would the author rewrite the Chinese herbal? Where will he use it in Europe?

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > 10-06-2026, 04:21 PM

  (10-06-2026, 12:11 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sorry, I don't understand what problems you are referring to.

  • The Dictator reads the SBJ aloud in Cantonese.
    
    
  • The Author writes down the Cantonese (which he speaks) in a phonetic notation.
    
    
  • Author goes back to Europe.
    
    
  • Author reads the Cantonese and understand it (minus technical terms).
    
    

  What is wrong here?

  
  

  (08-06-2026, 05:21 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Language change meant it was a very different situation from Latin where national pronunciations were quite understandable and educated people were expected to be able to converse in them. A phonetic transcription would have been opaque to the [edit: Dictator] even if he were proficient in the [Author's] alphabet. Further, the gap in vocabulary was wider than the gap between Latin and it's vernacular descendants, not just because of sound change, but because of a fundamental shift from one character to two character vocabulary, so the [Author] would have no point of entry for understanding it. This method would not create a useful record for the [Author], nor could someone trained in Classical Chinese understand it if he read it back to them, and this would have been apparent to everyone involved at the outset.

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  eggyk > 10-06-2026, 06:17 PM

  I believe the assumption is that the VMS author had decent/basic knowledge of the dialect in which he was being dictated to. That way reading aloud his voynichese would later produce words he would personally recognise. The rest would effectively require travel to the exact same place again in order to ask someone of the same spoken language.

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2026, 01:04 AM

  (10-06-2026, 03:12 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why would the author rewrite the Chinese herbal? Where will he use it in Europe?

  
  At this point it is only a guess that the Herbal sections too are transcriptions of other Chinese classics.  The only arguments for that are that the language seems to be the same, and those sections were bundled together with the Starred Parags section.  Not very strong, admitted...
  
  Assuming that the guess is correct, some of the plants listed in the SPS (like hemp, henbane, indigo, peach kernel, Indian madder, motherwort, willow -- to name just a few) were available in Europe too.  If You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is indeed about Viola tricolor, that is also a plant that grew in Europe as well. The Author may have recognized the names of some of those plants, and he could not tell about the others; so it would be safer to transcribe the whole herbal.  
  
  Anyway, if demand for a herb eventually developed in Europe (because the herbal said that it would restore youth, make one smart, grow hair on eggs, etc.), merchants would soon bring it from "China".  Like they were already doing with cloves, cinnamon, lapislazuli, silk, and other "Chinese" products not produced in Europe.
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2026, 01:23 AM

  (10-06-2026, 04:21 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (08-06-2026, 05:21 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Language change meant it was a very different situation from Latin where national pronunciations were quite understandable and educated people were expected to be able to converse in them. A phonetic transcription would have been opaque to the [edit: Dictator] even if he were proficient in the [Author's] alphabet. Further, the gap in vocabulary was wider than the gap between Latin and it's vernacular descendants, not just because of sound change, but because of a fundamental shift from one character to two character vocabulary, so the [Author] would have no point of entry for understanding it. This method would not create a useful record for the [Author], nor could someone trained in Classical Chinese understand it if he read it back to them, and this would have been apparent to everyone involved at the outset.

  
  I am sorry, but I still don't understand the objection. 
  
  The Dictator did not care about what the Author was writing.  The Author wrote everything down, even though he failed to understand many of the words.  Neither of them cared about (or needed to know) any other languages besides the local one.  Neither of them cared about hypothetical other people who spoke different languages.  Back home the Author could read his notes and "hear" them in that local language, and understand them as well as when they were dictated to him.  Maybe by then he had learned a few more technical terms. That was the best he could possibly do.  
  
  And if the Author read aloud what he wrote, just after writing it down, the Dictator would hear just what he had dictated (modulo the Author's flaws in pronunciation). Like the original printed text, that would be Classical Chinese -- which is a written language, not a spoken one -- read in the local spoken language.
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > 11-06-2026, 04:44 AM

  There's a few ways to interpret what you've written, so you tell me which is the main position you're defending. It may not be any of these, feel free to clarify:
  

  1. A text in Classical Chinese read with vernacular pronunciation constitutes a translation in and of itself, hence the Author could comprehend a substantial amount of text
     
  2. The Author was mainly creating a phonetic record of a recitation, and could phonetically recite the text but had low comprehension
     
  3. The VMS represents a translation as well as a phonetic encoding; e.g. there are substantial changes to make it conform with the vernacular that go beyond phonology
     

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2026, 01:46 PM

  (11-06-2026, 04:44 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There's a few ways to interpret what you've written, so you tell me which is the main position you're defending. It may not be any of these, feel free to clarify:
  

  1. A text in Classical Chinese read with vernacular pronunciation constitutes a translation in and of itself, hence the Author could comprehend a substantial amount of text
     
  2. The Author was mainly creating a phonetic record of a recitation, and could phonetically recite the text but had low comprehension
     
  3. The VMS represents a translation as well as a phonetic encoding; e.g. there are substantial changes to make it conform with the vernacular that go beyond phonology
     

  Definitely not 2 or 3, but not quite 1 either.
  
  All Chinese "dialects" have the same basic grammar.  Chinese writing is supposed to be read character by character in each dialect, and the result will be grammatically correct vernacular.  You may call it a "translation" if you wish; but then even reading a written text in Mandarin would be a "translation".
  
  It is not just a difference in "pronunciation".  Those "dialects" are often mutually unintelligible, because they may have completely different sets of  phonemes, and there will be no simple rule to map the syllables of one dialect to to those of another.  Here is how 崩中漏下赤白沃补虚 (a bit of the Rooster recipe) would read in modern Mandarin, Cantonese,and Hokkien:
  
  M: bēng zhòng lòu xià chì bái wò bǔ xū
  C: bang1 zung6 lau6 haa6 cik1 baak6 juk1 bou2 heoi1
  H: ping tòng liō hā tshik pi̍k ok póo hi
  
  All three readings would perfectly valid, and none is more "true" or "grammatical" than any other.
  
  Of course there will be differences between the classical and everyday language, and between 2500-year-old "classic" and 200-year-old "classic", like there are in Mandarin.  These differences may include grammatical constructs and rules specific to the everyday form or each dialect.  But that should not be a problem for the Shennon Bencao, since its recipes are very simple grammatically, consisting of lists of noun phrases or sentences that are rarely longer than three hanzi.  (A much bigger problem for the Author is that he would not have recognized the vernacular names of many of the diseases and plants.)
  
  The situation would be more complicated if the local language was not a Chinese dialect but another unrelated monosyllabic language like Vietnamese, because the grammar would be very different.  Vietnamese, for instance, has different subject-verb-object and adjective-noun orders.  Then we have at least three possibilities: each hanzi read in some local pseudo-Chinese normally used for that purpose (like Japanese "on" readings); or each hanzi read as an equivalent vernacular word (like the Japanese "kun" readings), but still with the Chinese word order; or a more free translation into vernacular that tries to respect the local word order.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows two of them, as best as I could make them out with the help of Google Translate and ChatGPT.  
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2026, 02:11 PM

  PS. I once watched a Chinese (Mainland) movie where detectives from Beijing go to a town in the deep North where people speak Mandarin very poorly or not at all.  In order to get a problematic word across, the speaker would draw its character on the palm of his hand, with the index finger as a pen and "air ink"; an then the other party would immediately understand.
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > 11-06-2026, 11:45 PM

  I think you are confusing Standard Chinese with Sinitic languages writ large. I can explain this in more detail if you think that will be fruitful, but the situation in that movie, and the situation under which Cantonese speakers can realize Chinese "in the vernacular" are when the writing is, shuffling some potentially important distinctions to the side, in Mandarin. The standard, written form uses Mandarin syntax and Mandarin vocabulary based specifically on the Beijing standard. This is the language that is taught in schools, and the language most people write in. Depending on where it is being taught, it is sometimes realized with the prescribed standard pronunciation from Beijing, but in Guangdong specifically it is taught using a Guangzhou phonetic standard. Languages that are not Mandarin have different vocabulary, syntax, and particles, so regardless of phonology, it is not the mother tongue of the people reading and writing it. The differences exceed the linguistic diversity in the Romance family, and no one thinks French is Italian with a funny accent.
  
  To be fair, I have seen sources word this in a way that really does imply Standard Chinese with Guangzhou's pronunciation is simply Cantonese. It is sometimes hard to tell if they are glossing over the little hitch that Standard Chinese read this way is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese or genuinely in error, but at any rate the implication is incorrect. This process results in a language that is grammatically correct Beijing Mandarin and only Beijing Mandarin. Cantonese has its own modest literary tradition which Standard/Mandarin speakers cannot read without genuine translation. I cannot do justice to the politics of written Hokkien here, but I can recommend keeping your opinion that Hokkien and Mandarin are interchangeable to yourself in Taiwan unless you are scrappy in a fight. There are other examples, but with an even smaller footprint. Now, as you can imagine, casual writing, especially between speakers of the same language, often deviates from formal Beijing Mandarin in ways that students of Medieval Latin would find familiar, but apart from genuine Cantonese and Hokkien, the aim and expectation is usually to write Standard Chinese.
  
  I've outlined how the fact these are fully realized languages applies to Classical Chinese several times now, and why the differences are so hard on the COT, and can clarify anything I've said now that we've cleared up that most Chinese speakers are bilingual, as historically most literate Chinese people have been. The reason why the popular movements largely agreed to stop using the 2500 year old language of the elite classes was because it was frigging hard to teach. Recitations are hard to understand, it has remote grammar, and a large proportion (like, 80%+) of the lexicon had changed usage and/or meaning. To eggyk's point, I too would assume that the Author was being dictated to in a language he could understand, but I think that assumption does not sit with other assumptions you've made or conclusions you've drawn

• RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

  rikforto > Yesterday, 12:07 AM

  (11-06-2026, 01:46 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows two of them, as best as I could make them out with the help of Google Translate and ChatGPT.  

  Oh, and I meant to say something about this. It passed through "雄鸡", which is an archaism only used in academic writings. Because it does get published, it's not not Standard Chinese if you want to push the descriptive point, but it's not really colloquial Mandarin either. This just tells me what the phonetic entry next to each character would be in a dictionary. I don't misunderstand there are many such dictionaries, as I personally own two of them, but I'm talking about usage
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