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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

  rikforto > 16-06-2026, 10:41 PM

  Jorge, I have read my most recent post again, and I believe it says what I mean it to. I encourage you to do the same, bearing in mind that I am not claiming the pseudo-Latin and pseudo-Italian are attested ways of writing French, and that I understand that they are not true Latin and true Italian.
  
  Understanding that constructed example is key to understanding why I don't presume this:
  

  (16-06-2026, 09:47 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Most of the syllables that he uttered, even though they were literal readings of the hanzi, would be common syllables of the local language, and the Author presumably understood most of them. 

  Bear in mind when thinking about this that the third French sentence above uses only words from the Italian vernacular, and is therefore basically the Italian vernacular and a Chinese traveler who speaks Italian should have no trouble with it, let alone all the Europeans who rushed to correct me

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 17-06-2026, 01:35 AM

  (16-06-2026, 10:41 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't presume this:
  

  (16-06-2026, 09:47 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Most of the syllables that he uttered, even though they were literal readings of the hanzi, would be common syllables of the local language, and the Author presumably understood most of them. 

  
  Well, I think you are just wrong here.  
  
  In your version of the French/Italian example, the printed text that you called "Old French Spelling" is written in a phonetic script, so it has an inherent reading -- in spoken Latin.  Therefore what you called "French reading" is not a "reading", but a translation of that Latin (written and spoken) into French.
  
  In the proposed COT scenario, the text that the Dictator was reading was nothing like your "Old French Spelling" phrase.  It was just a string of hanzi, with no inherent spoken version. Like the digits in my last example. There was no "Classical Chinese reading" to consider.  
  
  The syntax of the written SBJ text presumably was that of the language that the SBJ author spoke in 300 BCE; but, AFAIK, no one knows which language it was or what it sounded like.  Linguists have their conjectures, but they are highly speculative; and any way the Dictator would not know that language either.
  
  Thus the two readings that I gave, and their equivalents in any of the other 50+ Chinese languages, would all be equally valid readings of those hanzi.  And the syllables that the Dictator used would be common words from the local language.  If he were a modern Mandarin speaker he would read 鸡 as jī, because that hanzi means "chicken", and jī is the Mandarin word for "chicken".  He would not use the word for "chicken" in some imaginary "Classical Chinese language".
  
  All the best, --stolfi

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

  JoJo_Jost > 17-06-2026, 01:29 PM

  Hi Stolfi,
  
  while examining the structure of the VMS, I noticed a pattern that is likely already known, but I’d like to ask how it fits with your China hypothesis.
  
  It concerns the influence of the glyphs preceding the Edy family on the probability that the next unit after the final “y” is “qo.”
  
  For example, “y | qo” occurs only moderately frequently overall. However, depending on certain contexts on the left side, the probability increases sharply:
  
  y | qo: about 22% overall
  k  e  d y | qo: about 28 %
  ch e d y | qo: about 38%
  e  e d y | qo: about 39 %
  sh e d y | qo: about 51%
  
  The interesting point, then, is not simply that “qo” occurs after “y,” but that the characters preceding “edy” seem to influence the choice of the following “qo” unit across the entire visible range.
  
  How would this fit in with the idea of a phonetic transcription of Chinese? Of course, Chinese has a syllabic structure, limited final sounds, and dependencies that extend across syllable boundaries. But this specific effect seems different to me: The visible boundary after “y” is almost always present, yet the subsequent starting unit “qo” appears to be strongly conditioned by the preceding left-hand context, and that is unusual.
  
  Would your Chinese reference text predict this kind of conditioned transition across the (syllable) boundary? 
  
  Or am I misunderstanding something?

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

  rikforto > 17-06-2026, 07:48 PM

  (17-06-2026, 01:35 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In your version of the French/Italian example, the printed text that you called "Old French Spelling" is written in a phonetic script, so it has an inherent reading -- in spoken Latin.

  I do not call it "Old French Spelling"; I assume this is the Classical orthography I constructed? If so, I am fairly unambiguous that it has no "inherent pronunciation" and refer to it as only "on the page". You are free, of course, to impute whatever phonology you want, including reconstructed or Ecclesiastical Latin, but that is straightforwardly why there is no such thing as an "inherent" pronunciation in a script. There are admittedly very strong pressures in the logic of alphabets against the imagined convention I have proposed, but there is no "inherent" reason that French spelling could not have been this conservative in some strange timeline, and certainly no reason you cannot take it as a premise for the sake of argument.
  
  Because your premise that Latin has an "inherent pronunciation" is not sound, this conclusion does not follow:
  

  (17-06-2026, 01:35 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Therefore what you called "French reading" is not a "reading", but a translation of that Latin (written and spoken) into French.

  I have not chosen the Latin words based on translation, and explicitly wrote that "illi", "de totus", and "passum" were selected knowing they did not constitute translations. I don't think there's much ambiguity about that position for me to dispel, but whatever was left is certainly gone now. Also, I don't really understand how an "inherent pronunciation" would force this to be a translation into Latin if it came down to it because it deviates on syntax and lexical meaning, key components of the Latin language, but since there is no such thing as "inherent pronunciation", the issue is entirely moot.
  
  I also do not believe you are being consistent about what is and isn't a translation:
  

  (16-06-2026, 02:25 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No, sorry, it makes no sense to consider etymologies in a translation, in any situation.  In a free translation one expresses the meaning of the source phrase in the target language, using whatever words and syntax a native speaker would use. In a literal word-by-word translation one uses the word of the target language whose current meaning best matches the current meaning of the source word.  

  I agreed with this! Though, admittedly, this is the first you're hearing of it because there was a lot to cover in the post it is pulled from and the thread has continued to move forward. But all the points I have made over the last year, and the construction of my example, conform to this. I have made no effort in the psuedo-Latin to do a free translation; a learned (instead of native) Latin speaker would not use those words and syntax. At the same time, it is not a literal translation; in no way do I believe those are current (for a value of "current" in Latin) equivalents to the French. They are also not in error, at least as far as I know; I chose them very deliberately, to illustrate a specific approach to orthography.
  
  So my question is if you think that my imagined pseudo-Latin orthography for French is a translation, over my objections and against your definitions, and if you wish to revise your definitions for consistency with that. Or do you think that it is not a translation, and not a sensible way to do translation. Again, the latter would be common ground and I would be glad to hear it, but we can move forward other ways if not

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 20-06-2026, 07:53 AM

  (17-06-2026, 07:48 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I assume this is the Classical orthography I constructed? If so, I am fairly unambiguous that it has no "inherent pronunciation" and refer to it as only "on the page".

  
  I don't see what would be the point of that example with a constructed "Classical French orthography" that never existed, and besides would not be the same as a "Classical Italian orthography".
  
  The written forms of the Romance languages did not evolve gradually from written Latin.  Rather, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the spoken language (the "vernacular") in each region evolved, mostly (but not totally) independently, from "Vulgar Latin".  This was a distinct language, with mostly Latin vocabulary but radically simplified and modified syntax (without declensions and other hard-t- learn features, but with prepositions, articles, analytic tenses, fixed word order, etc) that was used by the Roman army and administration.  This language arose out of necessity, because this population consisted mostly of non-Latin-speakers recruited from all over the Empire, who would have been unable to learn the true Latin grammar.  
  
  Meanwhile, what little writing that occurred continued to be in more or less correct Latin, with declensions etc -- not in the vernaculars, not even in Vulgar Latin.  Because "writing" then meant "writing in Latin, of course, what else, silly question".  Some writers,especially outside the Church (students, notaries, lawyers etc.) often injected vernacular words and syntax in their writing, but that was not intentional; the result was not written vernacular but just broken Latin.   
  
  It was only around 1200, give or take a few centuries, that writers and poets realized the absurdity of that situation, and decided that they should write in the language that they spoke.  Some govs even explicitly switched from Latin to the written vernacular as their official written language.  They still used the Latin alphabet, and the spelling was somewhat based on Latin spelling, and it took another century or two before it became more or less fixed; but the result was no longer Latin, not even close -- and it was radically different for each spoken language.  
  
  That is why your modified example is both wrong and irrelevant to the Chinese situation.  There never existed an "Old Spelling" that would have been distinct from Latin but shared by both French and Italian; and there could not be, because the phonetic Latin alphabet would give such an "Old Spelling" an intrinsic reading that would have been a distinct spoken language, definitely neither French nor Italian.  Whereas the 50+ "Chinese" spoken languages, while mostly not mutually intelligible, do have essentially the same written form -- which, being ideographic and not phonetic, does not have an intrinsic pronunciation. 
  
  Your objections to the dictation scenario seem to derive from a commitment to the denial of this fact.  I understand that the Gov of Taiwan, for political reasons, may want to pretend that their written language is completely distinct from that of Mainland China.  It would go with their rejection of the "communist" simplified hanzi and of the Pinyin Romanization in favor of traditional characters and Gwoyeu Romatzyh.  Which is just as Orwellian as the insistence of the Gov of Beijing, also for political reasons, that the Chinese languages are just "dialects" of the "Chinese" language (Mandarin) and not distinct languages.
  
  The situation seems to be the same as that of Serbian and Croatian, only that in reverse. AFAIK, linguists agree that the spoken forms are essentially the same Serbo-Croatian language, which has a Croatian spelling using Latin letters and a Serbian spelling using Cyrillic.  But I gather that some people, especially in Croatia, insist that they are completely different languages -- again, for political motives.
  
  The Chinese situation is much more like my last numeric example.  The written form  of the numbers is the same for all European languages.  It has a single "alphabet" and "spelling" (the digits) and a specific "syntax" (the big-endian base 10 notation); but has no intrinsic pronunciation, because the "alphabet" is not phonetic.  The same written number is read in very different ways by speakers of different languages; but none of these readings is less "proper" or "original" than any other.  And thus they would be "readings", not "translations".  And for, any reader, the existence of other readings is irrelevant.  
  
  And, while each language has its own syntax and inflections for numbers, that differs somewhat from the mathematical "syntax", in any language the number can also be read digit-by-digit, and still be understood just as well.
  
  All the best, --stolfi

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

  rikforto > 20-06-2026, 06:06 PM

  I had hoped analogy would prove useful, and that I would get a direct answer to a direct question, but it seems not.
  
  Let's look instead at this claim:
  

  (20-06-2026, 07:53 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The situation seems to be the same as that of Serbian and Croatian, only that in reverse. AFAIK, linguists agree that the spoken forms are essentially the same Serbo-Croatian language, which has a Croatian spelling using Latin letters and a Serbian spelling using Cyrillic.  But I gather that some people, especially in Croatia, insist that they are completely different languages -- again, for political motives.

  To my understanding the example is correct. But it is an entirely different situation from Chinese.
  
  The reason a person in Guangzhou can read a newspaper from Beijing and vice versa is that there is mostly one written language in China, based on Mandarin, and literacy is synonymous with knowing Mandarin. I will call this Standard Chinese, but it has a few other names. I do not know why I am the first person to tell you this, but it is a readily available fact.
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
  

  Quote:It is commonly claimed that there is only one "Chinese" language, and that all of the variants of that language are dialects of it.  This conception of there being only one "Chinese" language plays havoc with efforts to classify the countless varieties of Sinitic speech forms into meaningful groups, branches, languages, and dialects, as is normal for other large families or groups of languages.
  
  The old canard that "when the dialects are written down they are the same" is simply untrue, since what gets written down are not the regional variants but standard Mandarin (and in earlier times Classical Chinese, a dead language for at least two thousand years).  If one, as a tour de force, does contrive to write unadulterated Cantonese or Taiwanese, for example, they will be as hard for a reader of Mandarin to understand as spoken Cantonese or Taiwanese is for a speaker of Mandarin to understand.

  
  I say mostly, but there is "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.", and its very existence should cast doubt on the idea that the differences are just dialectical. From the Wikipedia page:
  

  Quote:While the Mandarin form can to some extent be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage.

  It goes onto say:
  

  Quote:The standardization and adoption of written Mandarin preempted the development and standardization of vernaculars based on other varieties of Chinese. No matter which dialect one spoke, they still wrote in standardized Mandarin for everyday writing. However, Cantonese is unique amongst the non-Mandarin varieties in having a widely used written form. Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong used to be a British colony isolated from mainland China before 1997, so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin. Written Cantonese has developed as a means of informal communication. Still, Cantonese speakers must use standard written Chinese, or even literary Chinese, in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese may be unintelligible to speakers of other varieties of Chinese.

  (I think this sells a few of the other written varieties a little short, but depending on the cut-off for "widely used" and how much weight you put on the situation in Taiwan, it is not glaringly wrong either.)
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
  

  Quote:Much of the time "written Cantonese" is "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker" and so can only be distinguished from native Mandarin by relatively subtle cues. However, if what is written is truly Cantonese, it is easily distinguished from Mandarin if it is of any length because some common words are not cognate and are therefore written with different characters.

  You might notice a parallel with your description of medieval Latin, though I would not encourage you to describe living people using a lingua franca as speaking "brokenly". Again, the main form of written communication in China is Mandarin, barring some critical caveats.
  
  It is easily verified that this is an educational choice, that the language of instruction in Chinese classrooms is not the vernacular, but rather Standard Mandarin. The situation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and this is very much by design. As shown, the mutually unintelligibility is not merely due to sound change, but due to far-reaching differences between these languages, so this is not about children just speaking with Beijing's pronunciation, but an entirely different language being learned.
  
  I have seen parallel claims made about Classical Chinese, where it is even more preposterous. Bill Bryson, in his quite enjoyable English and How it Got That Way, claimed that people in China can read their classics "as if they were a shopping list". In Guangzhou, it is sociologically accurate to say Cantonese speakers can largely read Beijing newspapers; I've shown this is a description of widespread bilingualism, not something arising from the linguistics of Cantonese, but it is largely accurate. Classical Chinese is on the national tests, not because it is transparent to students but because they are mandated to learn it in addition to Mandarin. I don't want to understate the transference benefits the logographic script gives when students undertake this, and I am personally familiar with it from my own language studies, but I am not alone in thinking it is commonly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the West. From what I can tell, the most intensive parts of that education are after mandatory education ends in 9th grade, so it's not like every lettered person can just casually pick up 2500 year old texts and read them like a shopping list. At any rate, insofar as there is some truth to the claim, it is a description of what languages Chinese people formally learn in school rather than a linguistic description of written Chinese.
  
  And just, gut check here! The quotes by linguists and the descriptions of the educational landscape should be what convinces anyone reading this that written Cantonese, written Mandarin/Standard, and written Classical Chinese are not mutually intelligible, but a quick look at the time depths here should cast doubt on the common claim to the contrary. Classical Chinese was spoken* 2500 years ago. Mandarin and Cantonese diverged 1500 years ago. The implicit claim that there has been little enough grammatical and semantic change so as to render all Sinitic languages mutually intelligible in writing should raise more suspicion, I feel. I realize that doesn't quite get us to proving it's false, but I don't think people fully appreciate what is being claimed here.
  
  In fact, it would be as if every literate Romance speaker could fluently read Classical Latin, which someone might exactingly separate from Vulgar Latin, and any other Romance language that has evolved since the time of Cicero. A major hurdle to this in Europe is that national languages have their own spellings, but this is easily fixed. We can take the Latin spelling and just leave each word unchanged. I understand this is a perverse thing to do given that the logic of an alphabet is to represent phonemes, but I admit I did not think that would be quite as big an ask of my audience as it turned out to be. I also did not think, given the knowledge of Latin on this forum, that someone would insist there is an inherent pronunciation of written Latin given that historically there were many, many ways to realize a Latin text orally, and even today there are two major ones still in use. (Also, it is deeply amusing to me, a native English speaker, to consider the Latin script as having an inherent phonology, even if that's slightly different from what you are saying.) If you fix the spelling of words instead of phonemes in the time of Cicero, and then write French with that orthography, what you get is, "Illi non me placet passum de totus." As ahistorical and frankly illogical as this would have been, I also don't think it's that hard to understand that <pas> would be <passum> if all those historical choices you mention were made differently and instead French writers had decided to protect Latin orthographical words when transitioning to vernacular writing.
  
  The point is that this is not a perverse thing to do with a logography, so much so that explaining it in writing looks a little silly: the way you write 雄 in Classical Chinese is <雄>, the way you write it Mandarin is <雄>, the way you write it in Standard is <雄>, and the way you write it in Cantonese is <雄>. What this does not tell us is pronunciation or usage. Usage of 雄 happens to illustrate one of the ways you have to be careful treating Standard as strictly identical to Mandarin; the precise usage in "rooster" is borrowed into Standard in some contexts directly from Classical Chinese, but it is not correct in colloquial Mandarin. Not only is the colloquial compound for "rooster" in Cantonese different from Mandarin, it also doesn't owe to the Classical construction. This is directly analogous to the observation that French <pas> is <passum> but for lexical, grammatical, sound, and orthographical changes. There's a way in which they are the same word, and my "classical French orthography" leverages this fact in exact parallel to Chinese, but multiple people quickly saw there are important ways they are not the same word. For most of your audience, the parallel with the "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is opaque, but what we might call the passum-pas problem is frequent in this kind of reading**. I've also repeatedly mentioned the homophone problem, which has a little bit of an analogy in Modern French, but was so bad it drove a lot of the changes between Classical and Middle Chinese.
  
  The reason I've repeatedly said the readings you've proposed look fine to me is that this is a perfectly normal thing to do when reading Classical Chinese; unlike with Latin, the reconstructed pronunciation has little currency outside of specialist research into historical Chinese sound change. At this point, most people use Mandarin readings, and as mentioned a lot of people have exposure to doing these kinds of readings in a classroom. This is not the situation you imagine your author in, where he never had the logographic cues and he had no exposure to the Classical language. In fact, he is outright attempting evade those two crucial things. This is why your hypothetical looks so strange to me. I can imagine a very stubborn or misguided man taking down the readings for hundreds of pages, though that cracking sound you hear is my credulity coming under immense strain. It is an outright misunderstanding of the Sinitic languages to suppose he had much hope of ever recovering meaning from from such an exercise, and I think this would have quickly become obvious to him. That Google's LLM is telling you otherwise would impeach the credibility of Google AI if I thought things could be credible.
  
  Briefly about translation, the exact path of language change, the proliferation of compound forms after the Classical period, means your statistical arguments are all undercut if you try and imagine the Dictator was accommodating him that way. The SBJ translated into Cantonese, a thing that would have been extremely out of step with practice in 1400 and still isn't really done, would be a very different text than your reference text with different statistical properties. I've been clear that I'm not very convinced by the identification done this way:
  

  (16-06-2026, 02:25 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The evidence I have says that that what the Dictator did was either (A) or very close to it.  The spacings between the cribs are usually very precise, at ~5 EVA letters for each hanzi of the ZHB text.

  but you seem to think I should find it convincing. Were I convinced, I would think we could rule out any significant quantity of translation, the (B) option in this scenario. If you think there is a lot of room for interpretation and positing a very different base text than the one you claimed to have identified, I think that's very interesting and you might want to review some of the comments about the robustness of this method by me and other people with that in mind. To be clear, this is not me nitpicking some small deviations, which are quite expected in a premodern text, nor me misunderstanding there are a multiplicity of potential readings, regardless of language, that should be consistently identifiable with the same crib in the correct source text. This is me knowing that Classical Chinese is not anywhere close to a one-for-one reflex with languages after ~500 CE, and that your argument accounts for that by erroneously assuming the problem away.
  
  In conclusion, I think you are wrong about how written Chinese works and how it relates to the spoken languages. It is a commonly printed error in the West that Chinese speakers can all understand each other's written languages, a fact that is well-known among people informed about the actual linguistic situation in China. The grain of truth is that most people can read each other's writing, but only because literacy nowadays is almost entirely in Mandarin. It is even easier to exaggerate Classical literacy in the 21st Century, but it is not insubstantial, and that too is a fact about education rather language. It is controversial to say that Classical Chinese was easily understandable to the illiterate populace in the time of Confucius, and by the 1400s the days that one could understand it aurally based on the vernacular had long passed regardless of ones views on Old Chinese reconstruction. While that does not absolutely rule out "The Author" having taken dictation in Classical Chinese with a vernacular reading, it does make the COT as you've presented it far less plausible than it might seem based on those common misapprehensions. While it solves the problem of learning the characters, it does not solve the problem of actually reading the Shennong Bencao Jing, which I would take to be at least as important. I understand your position, but it is based on a mistake that raises a lot of questions about the usefulness of the VMS if you turn out to be correct about the text anyway.
  
  
  
  *The distinction where Old Chinese was spoken and Classical Chinese was written is usually motivated by a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about whether or not Classical Chinese was substantially the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., rather than a strict definition about medium. I lean towards thinking this may be correct, thought not only do I think the distinction is unmotivated in this conversation, when speaking of the written forms I do mean they are cognate between written Classical Chinese and later forms, even if I'm playing fast and loose about whether or not the written form is strictly the direct ancestor. That said, I have definitely seen sources say "Classical Chinese was the written language", and as a description of usage, that's correct, but hopefully its coming into focus that's a description of Classical Chinese having been the language of writing for 2400 years, not a well-justified description of written mutual intelligibility between well-formed Classical writing and Mandarin Chinese.
  
  **Google AI may say this problem does not exist, but until Google invents an LLM that can accurately explain how it interpreted a prompt and generated its output, there is simply no way to evaluate its "claims", and so the less its "conclusions" are introduced into human conversations, the better. It was a sin to create a machine in the likeness of human mind.

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 21-06-2026, 03:27 AM

  (20-06-2026, 06:06 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I had hoped analogy would prove useful, and that I would get a direct answer to a direct question, but it seems not.

  
  I cannot give a direct answer to a question that assumes a faulty premise.
  
  Anyway, I will reply to your last post separately.  Let me remind you and other readers that this discussion has absolutely no relevance to the SPS=SBJ claim or to the proposed "dictation" scenario, because 
  
  1) The SBJ that is homologous to the SPS was written in Chinese characters with the syntax of some language that was spoken around ~300 BCE.  Not with  Mandarin syntax or Cantonese syntax. So the question of how similar these two are is totally irrelevant.
  
  2)  The syntactic structure of the SBJ is extremely simple. Most sentences are just very short noun-adjective or verb-object constructions.  Thus the grammatical differences between that archaic language and the local language in the 1400s would be hardly noticeable, and would be the least of the obstacles to comprehension.
  
  3) The metrics strongly indicate that the mapping from the SBJ to the SPS was close to one character -> one spoken syllable -> one written Voynichese word.  (At most there may have been translations of some 2- or 3-hanzi compounds, like reading 瘀血 using the local reading for 血 but reading 血闭 using some other syllable, or vice-versa.) Thus it is pointless to conjecture about whether the Dictator should or would have freely translated the text, instead of just read each character in the local spoken language. 
  
  All the best, --stolfi

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

  Jorge_Stolfi > 21-06-2026, 05:46 AM

  (20-06-2026, 06:06 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

  
  We should stop this discussion since at this point it is no longer relevant to the Chinese Theory or the VMS.  But you implied that I don't know what I am talking about, so I must respond to that.  Starting with your quote:
  
  

  Quote:

  Quote:It is commonly claimed that there is only one "Chinese" language, and that all of the variants of that language are dialects of it.  This conception of there being only one "Chinese" language plays havoc with efforts to classify the countless varieties of Sinitic speech forms into meaningful groups, branches, languages, and dialects, as is normal for other large families or groups of languages.

  
  He is clearly referring to the spoken languages here, and rejecting the claim the spoken languages are just "dialects" of Mandarin.  Which is what I have been saying all along too.
  
  

  Quote:

  Quote:The old canard that "when the dialects are written down they are the same" is simply untrue, since what gets written down are not the regional variants but standard Mandarin (and in earlier times Classical Chinese, a dead language for at least two thousand years).  If one, as a tour de force, does contrive to write unadulterated Cantonese or Taiwanese, for example, they will be as hard for a reader of Mandarin to understand as spoken Cantonese or Taiwanese is for a speaker of Mandarin to understand.

  
  And here he is clearly referring to phonetic transcriptions of Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.  Which of course would be as mutually unintelligible as the spoken languages are.He is not referring to texts written in hanzi.  
  
  Again, I have been saying this all along myself. See my examples of how a certain bit of the SBJ would be read in  Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien.
  
  

  Quote:The reason a person in Guangzhou can read a newspaper from Beijing and vice versa is that [1] there is mostly one written language in China, [2] based on Mandarin, and [2] literacy is synonymous with knowing Mandarin.

  
  Claim [1] is true.  Claim [2] is uncertain because it depends on what "based on" means.  Claim [3] is false.  To be literate, a Cantonese speaker needs to know the meaning of each hanzi and compounds, and the syntax of Mandarin.  He does not need to know the Mandarin readings of the hanzi, and does not need to speak or understand spoken Mandarin.  
  
  

  Quote:

  Quote:The standardization and adoption of written Mandarin preempted the development and standardization of vernaculars based on other varieties of Chinese. No matter which dialect one spoke, they still wrote in standardized Mandarin for everyday writing. ... Still, Cantonese speakers must use standard written Chinese, or even literary Chinese, in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese may be unintelligible to speakers of other varieties of Chinese.

  
  

  Quote:Much of the time "written Cantonese" is "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker" and so can only be distinguished from native Mandarin by relatively subtle cues. However, if what is written is truly Cantonese, it is easily distinguished from Mandarin if it is of any length because some common words are not cognate and are therefore written with different characters.

  
  What these quotes are describing is not bilingualism -- like German speakers writing in English -- but diglossia -- when speakers of a single language use noticeably different vocabulary and syntax depending on the situation, or when writing versus speaking.  Often without even noticing.  
  
  Diglossia is slight in the US because children are generally taught to write as they speak.  It seems more significant in the UK, where speakers of local varieties of English, like Scots English, will still use the same "Standard English" vocabulary and grammar when writing a business letter or newspaper article.  It is very pronounced here in Brazil, where everyday spoken "Portuguese" is very different in grammar and vocabulary from the "Portuguese" that is taught in schools -- yet everybody will still use the latter when writing anything.
  
  You surely know that the teaching of some "Standard Written Chinese" -- hanzi with some "centrally defined" syntax -- and its use as the written language is not a modern thing, but has been the norm for more than 2000 years,and has been extremely important for the governance of the country since ever.  Thus it has been part of the writing culture of all Chinese languages. 
  
  

  Quote:the language of instruction in [Mainland?] Chinese classrooms is not the vernacular, but rather Standard Mandarin.

  
  The use of the spoken Mandarin  (not just hanzi with Mandarin syntax) in classrooms would be a modern thing.  Much like the use of spoken Standard Italian ("Tuscan") in Italian classrooms, independently of the local language.  And similar policies in other countries.  
  
  

  Quote:You might notice a parallel with your description of medieval Latin

  
  Again, the situation of the Chinese languages is completely different from the situation of Romance languages, modern or medieval.   Since the Latin-based scripts were phonetic, people who learned Latin in order to write automatically learned spoken Latin as well; and spoken Latin would be different from both the local vernacular and from Vulgar Latin.  No one writing in Latin would think that he was writing the vernacular language with some "classical orthography".
  
  

  Quote:I would not encourage you to describe living people using a lingua franca as speaking "brokenly".

  
  A lingua franca is a distinct language used by speakers of different languages to communicate.  It must be learned, and converting an expression from a local language to the lingua franca is translation, not just "reading".
  
  

  Quote:it is deeply amusing to me, a native English speaker, to consider the Latin script as having an inherent phonology, even if that's slightly different from what you are saying. If you fix the spelling of words instead of phonemes in the time of Cicero, and then write French with that orthography, what you get is, "Illi non me placet passum de totus."  ...

  
  Hm, is that boldface the root of our disagreement?  The last sentence would never be French written with a different orthography.  This term does not apply to any arbitrary mapping of spoken to written words.   There must be some systematic relation between the written form and the pronunciation, even if irregular.  In fact, that is true even in English, whose written form is usually said to be "not phonetic"...
  
  

  Quote:your statistical arguments are all undercut if you try and imagine the Dictator was accommodating him that way. The SBJ translated into Cantonese, a thing that would have been extremely out of step ...It is a commonly printed error in the West that Chinese speakers can all understand each other's written languages, a fact that is well-known among people informed about the actual linguistic situation in China.

  
  Google Translate can translate a text in hanzi to spoken Cantonese and vice-versa, and can give the Mandarin reading of a text in hanzi. 
  
  So, could you please show an example of a typical text in hanzi, as would be written by a Mandarin speaker, whose translation into Cantonese is not a one-by-one reading of the hanzi into Cantonese syllables?  Or whose one-by-one reading of the hanzi into Cantonese syllables would be incomprehensible to a Cantonese speaker who does not speak Mandarin?
  
  All the best, --stolfi

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

  rikforto > 22-06-2026, 09:17 PM

  The mutual intelligibility of the written Sinitic languages is a key assumption of your entire understanding of the COT. You have been at some pains to say that Classical Chinese is strictly a written language, and that going through and giving readings to each word in the Classical language should result in comprehensible language that The Author could then write down and read later. You have been consistent about this, and anyone casually following this thread has seen you explain a dictation scenario relying on this assumption repeatedly. I do not bring this up simply to impeach your credibility, and have been very careful to make sure that my explicit conclusions are specifically related to how you imagine the VMS was created. I have been content to keep this as a logos problem, because whether or not you know what you are talking about, the dictation scenario does not work.
  
  However, since you raised the ethos problem to text, I will too: I do think the fact you are stubbornly repeating a well-known misconception impeaches your credibility. I think the fact that you are clinging to it in the face of evidence to the contrary impeaches your credibility. I think the fact that you keep misrepresenting what I and other people have said impeaches your credibility. I've tried to steer clear of making my responses about that, but since you brought it up, no, I do not think people would be wise to take what you say about Sinitic languages at face value.
  
  Returning to logos, I don't think you're interpreting Victor Mair correctly. It's going to emerge that I have extra-textual reasons for thinking this, but even in the four corners of the quote I provided, it is, let's say, odd to interpret a passage about what gets written down in China as phonetic because famously that is not the kind of script that gets written down in China; it is odd that he would not distinguish if that was what he meant. Further, he says that in older times it was written down in Classical Chinese instead of Standard Mandarin, and I can only interpret the former in context as logographic. I would be curious to know what "earlier times" you think Classical Chinese was being written in a phonetic script, especially given how firm you've been that correctly understood Classical Chinese has no inherent phonetic rendering.
  
  Beyond the four corners of the quote, it is buck wild to see Victor Mair, of all people, interpreted as advocating for the widespread mutual intelligibility of Sinitic languages in writing. This man has spent much of his professional career trying to get people to stop making this mistake in the literature, and has actually been fairly successful. The following quotes are all from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The substance of the essay is about the term "fangyan", and explicitly the thorniness of using it in linguistics and translating it, but your use of "dialect" in this thread owes directly to English translations of "fangyan", whether you realized it or not. I've preferred "varieties of Chinese" and other such forms, directly owing to his advocacy, and "languages" where it is appropriate following him and others. With that in mind, here is what he has to say:
  

  Quote:First of all, the vast majority of Chinese languages have never received a written form. Mandarin, Fuchow, Cantonese, Shanghai, Suchow, and the other major fangyan do not share the same written language. I have seen scattered materials written in these different Chinese fangyan, both in tetragraphs and in romanized transcription, and it is safe to say that they barely resemble each other at all. Certainly they are no closer to each other than Dutch is to English or Italian to Spanish. The discrepancies between the major Chinese fangyan in phonology, lexicon, orthography, and grammar are so great that it is impossible for a reader of one of them to make much sense of materials written in another of them. This is an entirely different matter from that of classical (wenyan), vernacular (baihua), and mixed classical-vernacular (banwen-banbai) prestige, non-local or national written styles that are read by literate individuals throughout China according to the pronunciation of their local fangyan. Written Sinitic, with exceedingly few exceptions, has been restricted to some type of Classical Chinese or Mandarin, since the other languages of the group have never developed orthographical conventions that were recognized by a substantial segment of their speakers. In sum, regardless of the fact that such statements are almost universally accepted among Western treatments of Chinese language(s), it is false (or at least dangerously misleading) to claim that all the Chinese "dialects" share the same written language.

  The first thing this shows is that Mair believes the differences between the languages include lexicon and grammar, and that the differences in written forms are not solely matters of writing and phonology---though he obviously believes them salient as well. This passage also plainly says that writing is mainly restricted to Mandarin or Classical Chinese, which is my "claim [3]" in your numbering in your response.  He immediately goes on to say:
  

  Quote:It is also frequently asserted that, while there may be enormous differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiom among the major spoken Chinese fangyan, they basically share the same grammar. This assumption, too, remains to be proven, both in absolute and in comparative terms.

  I don't think the quote on the blog was actually ambiguous, but in the wider context of Mair's professional work it is simply impossible to take him to mean that Chinese is unified as a written language.
  
  In turn, the way you have added emphasis to Bill Poser's post is a good example of how [emphasis added] is a dangerous game. When you bold "some" in "some common words", it changes the emphasis; no one is saying that there are no cognates between Mandarin and Cantonese---or, to keep the relevance to the thread more immediate, between Classical and other languages. The point is that it is easy to zero in on which language you are looking at because there are frequent, prominent points of deviation that can be easily exploited to make the determination. At the same time, bolding the "of any length" turn of phrase is especially strange to me because it is saying that those divergence points will show up even in very short texts. There is no ambiguity because he says in the same post:
  

  Quote:A widely believed myth is that even forms of Chinese that are mutually incomprehensible in their spoken forms are identical in writing. This is not true.

  
  I debated how charitable I was going to be saying the way I clipped the quote introduced some ambiguity, but I'm sorry, your added emphasis here reveals a motivated reading and I think I should say it:
  

  (21-06-2026, 05:46 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  Quote:Much of the time "written Cantonese" is "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker" and so can only be distinguished from native Mandarin by relatively subtle cues. 

  That bolded part does not apply to language Poser describes in the next sentence as "truly Cantonese", but to "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker" [emphasis, because I too like to live dangerously, mine]. He is saying that if someone who speaks Cantonese writes Mandarin, it can be subtle to determine it was not a native Mandarin speaker who wrote it. Your bolding serves to emphasize that it is relative to something, and as already demonstrated, that is the fact that "truly Cantonese" texts are not subtly divergent. And note there is no serious ambiguity about the writing system, unless you are going to hold Poser is describing phonetic transcriptions as "characters".
  
  Your remark about diglossia tipped me down a rabbit hole I might post at some point because it dumped me out somewhere very relevant to this thread, but let me just say what I was going to say back when I was just going to check a few sources: What you are describing is not diglossia. If The Author did not have to formally learn the H language, if he got it "for free" by learning L language, they aren't actually two languages there and it is just "glossia". A prediction, and this is where that rabbit hole leads, is that native speakers cannot reliably recognize their own diglossia, and Chinese is a very complex example of this. The restrictions are even more severe in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., requiring the language be an older form, and by way of example he rules out Mandarin and Cantonese as diglossia, but this criterion was among the first to be relaxed as the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I was trying to avoid the competing definitions, and as I don't think it was well-conceived to define the ability to use two languages in any situation as dichotomous with the practice of using them in mutually exclusive settings, chose the more general term "bilingualism". But if we're clear on definitions here, yes, I think this is diglossia, because readings of the Classical language are not mutually intelligible with the L language; likewise, if it can be said that Standard and Cantonese are in an H-L language configuration, and I do hold this, it is because they are not mutually intelligible. The issue, however, is not the jargon---we just don't agree on the mutual intelligibility claims.
  
  Again, this has everything to do with your dictation scenario. If the language of the dictation is not mutually intelligible with the language you presume The Author spoke, then The Author could not understand the dictation or what he wrote down. This speaks directly to the whole idea of putting together a "Chinese" VMS. You are not wrong that I also make negative inferences when people repeat these common falsehoods and post motivated misreadings of sources, and I am relieved to finally just so, but the key point here was and remains that this dictation scenario does not work to create a readable book.

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

  Battler > 22-06-2026, 10:13 PM

  Yes, but it's not unlikely that someone dictating the text could have simply read out the Classical Chinese text in whatever his local pronunciation was in the early 15th century, or even that they may have had guidelines of how to adapt a Classical Chinese text to the local language when read out. They even had such guidelines in Japanese to turn Classical Chinese texts into Classical Japanese when read out. This is also done in Modern English when reading out, say, Shakespeare's texts - they are always read out using Modern English pronunciation, not the Middle English one from Shakespeare's time. Similarly, give a 19th textury text in Standard Slovenian to someone from a village in the middle of the Slovenian Littoral, and they're going to read it out with modern Slovenian Littoralese pronunciation. Even Latin has been so contorted - eg. Ecclesiastical Latin is basically Medieval Latin pronounced as if it was Italian.
  
  So someone reading out a Classical Chinese text to a European visitor in the pronunciation of whatever their early 15th century local variety of Chinese was, is not at all unlikely.
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