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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 > Yesterday, 02:29 PM

  I want to start with this, because the whole conversation turns on this:
  

  (30-06-2026, 07:30 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Dictator had one written text with 雄鸡 (but in traditional characters) on it, and the Author knew one spoken language, say Cantonese.

  I don't misunderstand this. Where we disagree is the nature of that written text and its relationship to the spoken languages. It is entirely appropriate for me to illustrate my point about that with multiple spoken languages, especially since you have yet to identify the language of the VMS. Regardless, though, you are contending there is but one written Chinese language, and so any Chinese language is appropriate to show that is not true. I also used the example languages you used, albeit with a bit more precision, and if you think that's out of bounds, it's because you do not understand your own examples. I don't think you do, and I now understand that's because you do not think that Chinese characters represent words. Until you address my evidence for asserting they are words head on, you will continue to talk past my examples where I've evidenced that that is not true.
  
  Which brings me to this analogy:
  

  (30-06-2026, 07:30 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If a flight info site says
    ✈ AA1211 [Plane taking off Icon] 11:00 LAX [plane landing icon] 18:10 SFO
  and a text-to-voice software reads it out as
    "flight A A one two one one departure one one zero zero L A X arrival one eight one zero S F O"

  These are ideographs because they stand directly for the ideas. There are no conventional readings for them as words and they naturally admit synonyms. In a great many cases they are simply orthographically incorrect, but their use in informal settings can productively take on new words for the idea it stands in for. A person is free to read, "my ✈ is late" as "my plane is late" or "my flight is late" because there is no reading and they must guess the ideas. There is genuinely no phonetic content in ✈. (TTS creates an interesting wrinkle that I can talk about, but I don't think it is clarifying at this juncture.)
  
  As explained at greater length my unanswered post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., this is not the case with Chinese. The words "飛行" mean flight in Standard Chinese and can only be read with a fixed phonology. Granted, these readings vary between languages and in some cases these characters admit a multiplicity of readings (but rarely more than one at a time in context). The practice of not learning another language's phonology in Chinese is interesting, but it should not obscure that "飛行" cannot be assumed to be the words used for "flight" in every Chinese language. A "reading" is not a freestyle exercise; one must adhere to the conventions of the language at hand, which are based on the characters and the words they represent, not ideography. (Given that most people for most of Chinese history were illiterate, I struggle to imagine how that would have even worked!) One thing I want to stress again is that none of this is foreign to European languages, it is only more pervasive in Chinese-derived orthographies. Latin admits a great many phonologies through regional pronunciation while still being fundamentally Latin; there are homonymous false friends between various languages, such as "actual" in Spanish and English. There are genuine transference benefits of this for literate speakers of Northeast Asian languages, but they do not come close to full mutual intelligibility without extensive training.
  
  I was not as pedantic as I could have been in my post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. because I had not yet realized that you did not understand Chinese languages are written in words, but it does clearly show the substance of this distinction, and the dictionary entries it is based on back the premise Chinese languages are written in words. I trace how different phrases for "rooster" give rise to different spoken terms when read character-by-character, but that not all those readings produce attested phrases in every language. Of particular interest, the Classical Chinese phrase for Rooster does not exist in the prestige dialect of Cantonese. This is not an issue of pronunciation as the reading exists; it is the phrase that does not. Nor an issue that I do not understand that The Dictator was supposed to be giving character readings from the same language as The Author; I have long conceded that your method produces proper readings based on Cantonese. My contention is that Chinese is written in words, and words are not the same between distinct languages, and that Classical Chinese is one of those languages.
  
  I finally broke down and tried out this exercise with Google's LLM, as insulting as it is to place a thoughtless machine with a random number generator in front of the great many worthwhile human beings who contributed to the dictionaries, academic work, and popular discussion that have been cited above. I got very different results from you, but it doesn't make sense to discuss that until we are on the same page about whether or not Chinese characters represent words because my best explanation---besides the undeniable fact that LLMs are a black boxes that do not follow understood principles---requires us to be on the same page about that.
  
  By the way, you have the answers to those "simple questions" you mention in your post, and until you deal directly with my evidence and observation that gai1 is not the head of the phrase that means "rooster" in Cantonese, you will not convince me you are following my argument and looking at the attendant evidence. This is true whether "gai1" is written <gai1>, <鸡>, or <雞>; if you the statement before the semicolon is nonsense under your understanding of how Chinese is written, that must be resolved before my points will make sense. (It still makes sense on its own terms, but if you convince me that that is wrong, it will moot the point; at any rate, it's the heart of our disagreement.)
  
  Some things that will not bring us closer together, regardless of which of us is correct:

  • Repeating your conception of how the dictation worked; we do not agree about the nature of the languages in play, so simply telling me which languages you think were being written and read will not resolve that I don't hold Classical Chinese to be a written register of Cantonese. I understand that if it is, a lot of my objections go away.
    
  • More examples of ideographs. I understand how ideographs work, and how you believe they apply to Chinese. You need to explain to me why lexicographic sources do not bear out your analogy. (Also, why my Japanese teachers used to take points off when I confused readings and synonymous kanji. My Chinese is quite poor, though I have some basic familiarity with Classical and Standard as a objects of linguistic study, but I was at one point quite used to reading words in Chinese scripts.)
    
  • More examples from Google "AI". If we do not agree about what the LLM is outputting (words or pictures), there is no point discussing why we might also be getting different output. This is true irrespective of the impact it's having on our prompting, but I strongly suspect that it is directly and indirectly relevant.
    

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

  DorotheeM > 5 hours ago

  (Yesterday, 02:29 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was not as pedantic as I could have been in my post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. because I had not yet realized that you did not understand Chinese languages are written in words, but it does clearly show the substance of this distinction, and the dictionary entries it is based on back the premise Chinese languages are written in words. I trace how different phrases for "rooster" give rise to different spoken terms when read character-by-character, but that not all those readings produce attested phrases in every language. Of particular interest, the Classical Chinese phrase for Rooster does not exist in the prestige dialect of Cantonese. This is not an issue of pronunciation as the reading exists; it is the phrase that does not. Nor an issue that I do not understand that The Dictator was supposed to be giving character readings from the same language as The Author; I have long conceded that your method produces proper readings based on Cantonese. My contention is that Chinese is written in words, and words are not the same between distinct languages, and that Classical Chinese is one of those languages.

  
  There are even more points to add:
  - Not all texts from China of the time we should consider were written in a script we nowadays would identify as Chinese, some were, to name one, based on the mongolian script. 
  
  - Next, there are huge differences between Wényán, the script a local copy of your book would uttermost probably have been in, and Báihuàwén, the script your local reader would have expected, at least in most parts of China, see my first remark. So much has changed: word meanings, order of strokes, (often tonality as well, just to add). He could have been able to understand Wényán, if he was well educated, but he would then struggle to find words for it. Imagine yourself reading a menu in a restaurant in, let's say, Albania. You will certainly have the idea what "Spageti" means, get a good or not so good guess on "Mish viçi me rrikë" (as you may know other languages as well). But Tavë Elbasani? You wouldn't even know how to pronounce it. And now add the assumption parts of the menu are written in the traditional Todhri alphabet. The pictures on the menu don't help a lot.  
  
  - And finally, true, Wényán was mostly about words. One Sign, one word, that was where Chinese started - almost a strict rule with only few assumptions. But this changed partly with classical chinese, this is why there where rhyme dictionaries, helping with both syllables (Fǎnqiè) - with do not work the same allover the country, as the regional uses multifurcated. And Pǔtōnghuà, the language your AI tool uses for the sake of not knowing anything about classic chinese texts, is again totally different. Most words of today's Chinese are made of two, sometimes even three or more signs. And a lot of words from now appear to be false friends, having changed their meanings, not to say their pronounciations and a lot more. Even for these differences alone one may say that your attemps are like translating Latin using a handbook of contemporary Castellano.  I strongly recommend you to skip the usage if AI here or setup a dedicated, owned LLM for precisely your purposes. Every new website Google founds would change your outcome otherwise.
  
  
  Cheers,
  
  Doro

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

  Mauro > 4 hours ago

  (5 hours ago)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.get a good or not so good guess on "Mish viçi me rrikë"

  
  My guess was badly wrong: "mixed fishes with rice" 

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

  eggyk > 4 hours ago

  (30-06-2026, 05:08 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Eggyk, if Jorge retreats to your position I will address it in more detail,

  
  The entire origin of this specific theory (and the reason a dictation backstory has been proposed) is based on the supposed match in the relative positions of daiin with the relative positions of the word "use" in the SBJ. To 'retreat' in this position would be to retreat to the initial topic imo. 
  
  It's entirely possible that SPS is a voynichese version of the SBJ, AND also possible that the dictation scenario is wrong/impossible. Shouldn't the focus be on confirming if the texts match before determining exactly how it was written? This detailed, interesting and lengthy debate is focusing on the 'how', when we still don't know the if. 
  
  Even if the dictation scenario were to be entirely falsified, that would not falsify the foundation of the theory. If the underlying theory of a match is falsified, the discussion on how it came to be isn't necessary.

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

  Ruby Novacna > 3 hours ago

  Hi, Jorge!
  The discussions in this thread must be very interesting and informative, but they're so long that I'm completely lost. 
  I'm eagerly awaiting your results, because I firmly believe that even if the original was in Chinese, our text would be a translation, not a transcription.
  
  P.S. I have another very simple question: where is the link to your current research? 
  The link in your profile on this forum doesn't lead to anything I'm interested in. 
  Could you please add the updated link to your profile or even your signature? 
  Thank you in advance.

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

  rikforto > 51 minutes ago

  (4 hours ago)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The entire origin of this specific theory (and the reason a dictation backstory has been proposed) is based on the supposed match in the relative positions of daiin with the relative positions of the word "use" in the SBJ. To 'retreat' in this position would be to retreat to the initial topic imo. 

  I have said at length that that "match" is no such thing. In short, if you have to create a new critical edition of the Shennong Bencao Jing (where you delete the most common verb???), allow the edited characters to match 120 different Voynichese strings (not even orthographic words, conventionally understood), and only get a statistical match for a third of the entries you test, I don't think we can reject the null hypothesis that those cribs are spurious. I've said this, and other people have said most of this.
  
  But Jorge is the one resting part of his argument on the idea that Chinese people are illiterate and just communicate in pictures, and I think it is worth correcting the record on that for its own sake, for reasons that should be plain from that formulation. But it is relevant to this thread, as he thinks it is entirely plausible that The Author could read all Chinese texts (which under this conception would not be "texts" as such) but for knowing the readings, has based his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on those assumptions, has assumed that Chinese has no grammar (!!!) that would get in the way of doing that, and when asked about the plausibility of the text being in Chinese goes back to the dictation scenario. These problems would remain, albeit with less urgency, if I found the match convincing, but as things stand, I think they go to what a longshot this "match" is for exactly the reasons that Jorge has argued they are not problems
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