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The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
- The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
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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 > Yesterday, 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 > Yesterday, 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?
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RE: The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against
rikforto > 9 hours ago
(Yesterday, 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:
(Yesterday, 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