(9 hours ago)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The process was centralized and under the auspices of the Emperor, yes, but China was heavily bureaucratized and not personally handled by him. This was not "a whim", but a serious question of how to administer both religious rite and grain storage. I suppose promulgating a new calendar as part of rebelling is "for political expediency", but I specifically say the main change is the issuer, not the calendrical contents per se, so it is a plain mischaracterization of my position. From my perspective, the main points were that setting solar terms was a legal and religious right of the Emperor, that astrologers had further philosophical cause to respect that, and that your proposed reading of the VMS doesn't solve any problem the Astronomical Bureau hadn't solved in antiquity.
What process? What problem? There is no evidence in your long post that any Emperor ever changed the solar terms. They were not holidays. The Emperors may have changed the
calendar -- but the solar terms are not a calendar, they are a tool used to synchronize the calendar with the seasons.
The whole story seems to be just wishful thinking. Sorry but it
does read like a lalamo hallucination. The sort of text that a lalamo would produce if asked to refute the theory that the diagrams of the VMS Zodiac are related to solar terms.
And, anyway, even if Emperors did shift the solar terms around, that has absolutely no impact on the COT explanation of the VMS Zodiac. All the COT needs is that the Author had access to
one "Chinese" book that explained the solar term system, with one page for each of the 24 gaps, each page with a list of precisely 15 names. Maybe arranged in a circular diagram -- but that detail may have been the Author's idea, when he finally put his notes to vellum.
Unless you "know" that some Emperor in in 1234 CE decided that there would be 27 solar terms, not 24. Or that the names of his three favorite concubines should be added to the 15 things that traditionally were assigned to the interval between solar points 17 and 18...
Quote:This is a recurring pattern in our conversations, where you're obviously filtering what you read through your preconceptions.
Well, I believe that the evidence I showed proves that the SPS is a transcription of the SBJ. So of course I must take that into account in what I write. At least on this thread, where I am allowed to...
I suppose that you are not familiar with probability theory, are you?
On the other hand, it is you who is always over-interpreting every little gap in our knowledge as categorical "proof" that the COT is nonsense.
Quote:why I doubt your various interpretations and identifications:
1.Using the modern, spatial definition of the solar term; in period they were temporal. This was explained in a footnote on the Wikipedia defintion you directed me to, and presumably read.
That is an example of the over-interpretation I mentioned above.
Again, indeed, solar terms were originally a division of the
year into 24 equal parts. That is, the interval between two solar points was a fixed
fractional and
uniform number of days -- ~365.25/24 = ~15.218 days.
One year is defined as the time that the sun takes to traverse the whole Ecliptic and return to the same position on the sky relative to the "fixed" stars. Therefore, explicitly or implicitly, the solar terms also divided the Ecliptic into 24 parts; and the start of that division was defined as the moment when the Sun was at a specific point of the Ecliptic (around February 4 Gregorian).
But since the orbit of the Earth is not quite circular, and its orbital speed varies a bit along the year, those intervals on the Ecliptic were not equal; some were a bit more than 15 Babylonian degrees, some a bit less. But the variations were small and gradual. Around 1700s astronomers found those variations annoying and redefined the solar terms as 24 equal arcs of the Ecliptic, but starting at the same spot. That change shifted the positions of the other solar points on the Ecliptic a bit.
Since then, the time the Sun takes between consecutive solar terms is a bit more or a bit less than 15.218 days, depending on the time of the year. Specifically, it varies between ~14.714 days (around January 3-5) and ~15.735 days (around July 4-6). But the solar terms still are a division of the year into 24
equal parts: only the precise sense of "equal" changed a bit.
Quote:2. The degree controversy was largely entwined with the same hasty reading of modern evidence, but there was a separate refusal to take scholarly work on historic Chinese astronomy seriously
There was no such refusal. I accepted that Chinese astronomers measured positions of stars and planets in units of 1/365.25 of a circle, or whatever, instead of 1/360 of a circle. (Although it is not clear whether that practice extended to geometry outside of astronomy.)
But I explained why that fact was irrelevant.
True, when I first had the idea that the VMS Zodiac could be about the Chinese solar terms several years ago, I assumed that each diagram was about an arc of 15 Babylonian degrees of the Ecliptic, and each nymph/star/label was about an arc of 1 Babylonian degree.
But that was a hasty guess. I took it back. But it does not matter. The nymph/star/labels
are a division of the Aries and Taurus diagrams into exactly 15 parts, and of the other diagrams into 30 parts. Not sometimes 28 sometimes 30 sometimes 31. The main point is that the VMS Zodiac divides the year
into 24 parts that are rigorously
equal in the number of "things".
As I wrote before, I cannot explain why each diagram has
specifically 15 "things", rather than 10, 12, 16, or 23.
But neither can you under the "European" Origin Theory.
That choice results in the year having exactly 360 "things", not 365.25. This is a fact about the VMS, not a theory. But if you say that the "things" cannot be degrees, then I cannot explain why 360 and not 240 or 300.
Quote:Using Gregorian dates to inform your reading of the Zodiac section, rather than checking period accurate ones
What do you mean? There is the puzzle of why the VMS Zodiac begins with Pisces and March, which the EOT cannot explain. I gave a detailed explanation of how, under the COT, the Author could have made those choices --
in terms of the Julian calendar.
Quote:Ignoring that someone early in the manuscript's history thought "Mars" was a perfectly good interpretation of Pisces. Missing that you'd shifted the zodiac signs by 15 degrees off your interpretation
Sorry, I do not understand this point. My proposed explanation did not depend on what someone in Europe may have thought.
Quote:Your reading of the Zodiac pages proved to be mostly anachronism and not terribly internally consistent
False. It is not an anachronism, and so far it is the only explanation that actually explains most of its puzzling aspects (instead of reducing them to some bigger puzzles.)
Quote:Adding to Jonas's description of Japanese literary practice that Chinese readings are monosyllabic; my Kanji dictionary has numerous polysyllabic onyomi.
The Japanese kanji dictionary tells the many ways a kanji that is used
today in Japanese texts can be read, depending on context. There may be multiple readings in both onyomi and kunyomi, some monosyllabic, some polysyllabic.
The dictionary is not supposed to tell how a Japanese doctor would have read a Chinese medical text in the 1400s.
But anyway that is only marginally relevant, since the probability of an European traveler having reached
Japan before ~1500 is very low.
But I don't know whether there were any non-European, non-"Chinese" visitors to Japan, in the 1300-1400 time frame, that could have been the VMS Author.
Quote:Substantially reinterpreting the text of the VMS so it better fits your theory. (I know you will contest this, but this is one of the widest points of criticism you've gotten. Assuming daiin is misspelled some 42% of the time in the short passage you are relying on to establish your cribs is tantamount to re-writing the text. This is not me demanding perfection, this is me demanding that cribs be in the VMS.)
No, it
is you demanding perfection.
The "rewritings" are not arbitrary. They are changes of a single letter by another letter that would look similar in cursive handwriting.
There is plenty of evidence that our VMS transcriptions contain many errors; we just don't know how many. With that mindset, you will never accept any solution, COT or not -- because any solution will have to hack around those errors.
And those variant spellings may be due to the Author confusing similar sounds; which is quite likely in the scenario proposed by the COT.
Even allowing those alternative spellings, the *
aiin words in the longest SPS paragraph could not possibly have matched the positions of the 主 characters in the longest SBJ recipe so precisely just by chance.
And it may still turn out that the Voynichese for 主 is just
aiin, not
daiin. Although, at this point, I think that this alternative is less likely than the
k/
d/
l confusion.
As I wrote before, you (like many people here) are assuming, consciously or unconsciously, that the VMS is a
cryptographic puzzle. And therefore you expect and demand a solution like the solution any such puzzles: someone guesses the encryption algorithm, inverts it, and poof! there is the plaintext. Perfect, with no ambiguities, no guesses, etc.
Well, sorry, but the VMS is
not a cryptographic puzzle. A simple encryption method has been ruled out by all the work of the last 100 years. A complicated method would be an anachronism and would be unheard of for a document of this size and contents.
The VMS is almost certainly a
lost language puzzle. Like deciphering Sumerian, Hittite, Etruscan, Mayan, Linear A... Such puzzles do not have a "poof" solution. There will be no algorithm. Even if the COT and the SPS=SBJ claim were false, the solution will be messy and uncertain, unraveled little by little over decades, requiring guesses at every step. Is that the Sumerian word for a triple-hump camel, not seen so far? Or a misspelling of the word "horse" by the apprentice scribe? Or just an accidental scratch on the clay tablet?
Quote:Substantially editing your edition of the Shennong Bencao Jing to make it fit the VMS.
I did not do such thing. I was using the text as I obtained from the Chinese Texts Project and the Chinese Wikisource, with minimal corrections where they disagreed or were corrupt (which did not affect the Rooster recipe).
The only "editing" I did on the SBJ text of the Rooster recipe was excluding the the "Nature" and "Provenance" fields (that, as far as I got, were omitted by the VMS author in all entries), the last sub-entry about "white grubs" (that, for the last 1000 years, no Chinese doctor could make sense of), and a 2-hanzi "population" tag "For Women" (that, again, seems to have been systematically omitted by the Author in all recipes) Exept for "Women", these excluded parts were at the beginniing and at the end of the entry, so they did not affect the spacings between the主 and *
aiin keywords.
Quote:Ignoring the evidence I found describing a more troubled reconstruction [...] Downplaying the Ming reconstructions of the Shennong Bencao Jing...
I must
THANK YOU REALLY for pointing out that those SBJ files that I was using were dubious attempts at reconstructing the SBJ text as it may have been before 500 CE, and not the version that a Chinese doctor would know by 1400 CE.
The latter most likely would have been the version that is embedded in the massive Zhenghe / Zhenglei materia medicas, widely circulating as block prints at the time. Those books chopped up the Shennong text and interpolated tons of comments and expansions, but they carefully marked out the "original" Shennong parts with double-size font and/or color and/or reverse-print (white on black). Thus a Chinese doctor by 1400 CE could have easily read out the "pure" Shennong Bencao text while skipping all the interpolated material.
Of course there were many differences between that allegedly "pure and original" embedded text and both the 300 BCE version and the post-1700 reconstructions. I downloaded a digital file of the Zhenghe Bencao (ZHB) allegedly made from one of those block prints, and I am now extracting the "pure 1400 CE" SBJ text from it.
It is a slow and tiring process, because I can't read Chinese. Some of the extraneous material is easily removed because it is identifiable by the markup in the file. But the digital version does not record all the typographic markup of the print (or maybe I deleted some critical HTML markup by mistake), so I must rely on Google AI and ChatGPT for the final cleanup. I must ask them to explain their answers almost on every sentence and every "use" entry, and check the answers of one against the other. I often have to challenge them with "I have a source that says the opposite, is that correct" -- to which they not rarely reply "it was very smart of you to question that point, because I was wrong, although my mistake was excusable because..."
(And at some point Google AI started citing some document it found at ic.unicamp.br. I had to instruct it to ignore all documents from that site as they were full of errors...)
BUT the results have been worth all that work. The SJB extracted from the ZHB differs in many small but critical details from the file I was using. The most important difference is that it uses only 主 to introduce the list of uses, whereas my previous file used either 主 or 主治. This makes a big difference for the matching effort because a difference of 1 hanzi in the distance between occurrences of 主 is expected to correspond to a difference of 5 EVA letters in the distance between the correscponding *
aiin.
The distances now match much better than before: all but one are within ±1 EVA letter from the expected value.
And moreover the new version of the Rooster recipe has one additional 主, that was omitted in my previous version.
That new 主 now perfectly matches a kaiin that was unmatched before.
The bad news is that I must redo much of the work I did over the past two months, of matching each SBJ recipe against all the 243 good SPS parags and deciding in each case whether the best-matching parag is good enough. I still don't know how to automate this last step.
Quote:This is to say nothing of your pattern of just appealing to ignorance when the pressure gets too high. In particular, I am confused as to why you think I have much doubt that Japanese historically has had open syllables and a writing system to express that.
What do you mean? I studied Japanese for 18 months, some 40 years ago. While I forgot a lot of what I had learned, I still can read hiragana and katakana.
But that too is irrelevant.
IF the COT scenario happened in Japan, and the Dictator was Japanese, his copy of the SBJ would have been written in Chinese, all in kanji; he would have read it in some pseudo-Chinese, almost certainly one syllable per kanji; and the Author would have recorded it in his invented phonetic shorthand.
Quote:After a point, anything is possible, and in that spirit maybe some Japanese scholar was reading Chinese with an unattested Japanese accent to a man who did not know Chinese so he could record it, but it bears repeating that this does not result in intelligible text for people who do know Chinese realized through Kanbun. At some point enough of these problems have stacked up that I don't think I'm being churlish when I say that you're taxing my patience with hypotheticals.
Wait, who is taxing whose patience?...
Quote:The fact that none of this seems to be real is a huge problem. You are comparing a hypothetical version of the VMS to a late reconstruction of the Shennong Bencaojing, both of which you edited both to increase the fit, to arrive at a very loose match in a yet-unidentified language
Again, the edits I did to the Rooster entry (deleting the fields that were useless for the supposed purpose of the VMS) did not affect the measurements that prove the match. The transcription of the VMS that I am using is not hypothetical (?!?), and I did not edit it to get that match.
Quote:'m less troubled than a lot of people that the supposed journey to the East left no other evidence
Actually, it did - the VMS.
Quote:but the fact it's entirely conjectural and in a period when that was vanishingly rare
We have many
documented cases of merchants and missionaries visiting East Asia, including China, before 1400, and stayed there long enough to do what the COT proposes. Have you heard of Marco Polo? The
undocumented cases must be in the hundreds, if not the tens of thousands. Just
one of them could have created the VMS.
Quote:That you've also confidently asserted to know the directions given at the scriptorium, and more preposterously the thoughts of the "author" about the final product,
... which were deducted from common sense. Only to show that some common assumptions about the Author's behavior and how the scribing was done -- like the Scribe encoding each line on the fly with a break-sensitve cipher, or generating each word by shuffling a set of cards -- are both unnecessary and absurd.
Quote:Everywhere I've looked in your arguments I've found vapor, and your responses increasingly lack the charity I've been trying to offer you.
Well, the sentiment is mutual.
All the best, regardless --stolfi