Re: Chinese (Doubled words)

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>     > Supporters of the Chinese theory have to tell us who was
>     > supposed to read the manuscript.
>
> You have two questions here: (1) "why not use the native scripts", and
> (2) "why not use a script based on the Roman alphabet".
>
> The answers obviously depend on who wrote the manuscript, and why.
> The author could be either an European, or a native.
> In this message I will explore the first alternative only.

The scenarios you give are clearly possible, and I do not dismiss
the Chinese theory entirely, but I think it is much more probable
that a group of Europeans enciphered secret knowledge about herbs,
times of conception etc for their own private use.

I have taken a look at some Chinese character text (Sun Tzu and the
first chapters of the Red Chamber). The ten most common characters in
Sun Tzu are not reduplicated in the entire text, and of the ten most
common characters in the Red Chamber only one is reduplicated once in
the sample (that character is yi1, 'one'). It remains to be seen
how common reduplication is in a phonetic rendering of a text in
Chinese or a similar language. I am not certain that it will be
sufficient to rewrite a literary character text in pinyin and make
a count. I have heard that many Chinese classics are written in such
a concise style that they are ambiguous when spoken: they are
designed for private reading.

Philip Neal



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