(03-10-2026, 03:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Back to Red Rooster recipe: if the local language that the Author could speak was modern Mandarin (which it totally wasn't, but just suppose), this is what the Dictator would have said out loud, reading the SBJ from the ZHB:

dān xióng jī: zhǔ: (nǚ rén) bēng zhōng, lòu
xià, chì bái wò. bǔ xū, wēn zhōng, zhǐ xuè,
tōng shén, shā dú, bì bù xiáng. tóu: zhǔ: shā
guǐ. fáng: zhǔ: ěr lóng. cháng: zhǔ: yí nì.
pí chī guǒ huáng pí: zhǔ: xiè lì. niào bái:
zhǔ: xiāo kě, shāng hán hán rè. hé yǔ: zhǔ:
xià xuè bì. jīzǐ: zhǔ: chú rè huǒ chuāng,
diān jìng; kě zuò: hǔ pò.

The Author probably understood correctly the words in green, because (IIUC) they are all common words like "red", "male", "chicken", "mainly", "woman", "red", "white", "blood", etc.  The others seem to be mostly medical terms that I suppose he would not have learned even after living for years in the place.

And much of that text is 2-3 syllable compound terms whose meaning he probably did not know, even if he got the meaning of the individual syllables.  He probably understood niào (excrement) and bái (white), but he may have not have figured out that niào bái mean the white part of chicken poo, which is mostly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  

According to the SBJ, niào bái is a treatment for xiāo kě.  He may have understood both syllables -- xiāo = "extinguish, consume" and kě = "thirst"; but he probably would not have known that the pair did not mean "satiate thirst", but rather "wasting thirst" -- which my lalamo says is "diabetes".  So recording [his idea of] the translation, instead of the sound, would have been an error that could not be fixed later.