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I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter.

by huahaiy 10y ago

I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter. However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before. The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
Sinologist Victor Mair reports: " On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them." ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chinese-people-read-the-literature-of-2-500-years-ago-as-easily-as-yesterday http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
- huahaiy 10y ago
  These students are college aged people in US. They are not what I call "educated Chinese people". The way the classic Chinese was written has always been different from everyday vernacular Chinese. This has been true for every generation of Chinese learners since ancient times. How people spoke Chinese have changed over the years dramatically. I don't think the ancient ways of speaking Chinese is understandable by modern Chinese. However, the way the language is written in formal setting has changed little up to the end of Qing dynasty in 1912. An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. During the exam, some enterprising students could even write their essays entirely in classic Chinese, garnering wide circulations on the internet.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. There's a serious conflict here with your simultaneous claim that college graduates aren't yet "educated".
    - huahaiy 10y ago
      What's the conflict? College graduates from where? A college graduate who has gone through the entire Chinese education system would be required to learn reading comprehension of classic Chinese. Granted, there are always students for one reason or another claimed that they have leaned nothing from school. It's either a false claim, or if that's true, calling them educated would be a stretch, isn't it?
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
thaumasiotes 10y ago
A couple of things might be going on in your comment: - You might be confusing the ability to pronounce a sentence with the ability to understand the meaning of a sentence. As here, in "Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings." This confuses "traditional Chinese", the spelling system from before 1950, with Middle Chinese, the language Wang Anshi wrote in. It is much like saying that the Romans didn't have difficulty reading Greek because their alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. It happens that Wang Anshi wrote using traditional character forms; that is unrelated to his language. For another example, the opening couplet from Jabberwocky is in faux English: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe This has no meaning, but no modern English speaker should have difficulty reading it aloud. - You might be suffering from a cognitive illusion. - You might feel compelled to defend this viewpoint out of some misplaced ethnic pride. Regardless, I can safely say that your viewpoint here is so much 费话, and your "firsthand knowledge" is either a lie or stunningly nonrepresentative. Though the topic has come up many times, no Chinese person of my acquaintance (and they tend to come from 复旦大学) has ever claimed that the Chinese of today can understand Old Chinese without extensive training in the field, much more than the educational system provides by default. They all admit, without feeling any shame, that Old Chinese is totally unintelligible to them and everyone else. You might even be the first Chinese person I've seen making this claim from the safety of the internet -- the claim is common, but generally it comes from whites who are blindly repeating what they heard somewhere.
- huahaiy 10y ago
  Of course reading classic Chinese requires extensive training, that's what their middle and high school educations are for. I don't know who you talked to, but if they are in college, they have passed that part of the training. They might be shamed to admit to a foreigner how much of their lives have been wasted in studying these useless things every semester. But that does not change the fact that they are trained to read classic text, because that's what the state mandates. What you do not seem to understand, is that the classic written Chinese had always been different from vernacular Chinese. This was true even for ancient times, because the classic written Chinese is NOT a record of spoken language, but a literary form, whose mastering is a prerequisite towards ascending into the aristocracy class in China.

by huahaiy 10y ago

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

Sinologist Victor Mair reports: " On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them." ( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chinese-people-read-the-literature-of-2-500-years-ago-as-easily-as-yesterday http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...

huahaiy 10y ago
These students are college aged people in US. They are not what I call "educated Chinese people". The way the classic Chinese was written has always been different from everyday vernacular Chinese. This has been true for every generation of Chinese learners since ancient times. How people spoke Chinese have changed over the years dramatically. I don't think the ancient ways of speaking Chinese is understandable by modern Chinese. However, the way the language is written in formal setting has changed little up to the end of Qing dynasty in 1912. An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. During the exam, some enterprising students could even write their essays entirely in classic Chinese, garnering wide circulations on the internet.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. There's a serious conflict here with your simultaneous claim that college graduates aren't yet "educated".
  - huahaiy 10y ago
    What's the conflict? College graduates from where? A college graduate who has gone through the entire Chinese education system would be required to learn reading comprehension of classic Chinese. Granted, there are always students for one reason or another claimed that they have leaned nothing from school. It's either a false claim, or if that's true, calling them educated would be a stretch, isn't it?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

thaumasiotes 10y ago

A couple of things might be going on in your comment: - You might be confusing the ability to pronounce a sentence with the ability to understand the meaning of a sentence. As here, in "Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings." This confuses "traditional Chinese", the spelling system from before 1950, with Middle Chinese, the language Wang Anshi wrote in. It is much like saying that the Romans didn't have difficulty reading Greek because their alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. It happens that Wang Anshi wrote using traditional character forms; that is unrelated to his language. For another example, the opening couplet from Jabberwocky is in faux English: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe This has no meaning, but no modern English speaker should have difficulty reading it aloud. - You might be suffering from a cognitive illusion. - You might feel compelled to defend this viewpoint out of some misplaced ethnic pride. Regardless, I can safely say that your viewpoint here is so much 费话, and your "firsthand knowledge" is either a lie or stunningly nonrepresentative. Though the topic has come up many times, no Chinese person of my acquaintance (and they tend to come from 复旦大学) has ever claimed that the Chinese of today can understand Old Chinese without extensive training in the field, much more than the educational system provides by default. They all admit, without feeling any shame, that Old Chinese is totally unintelligible to them and everyone else. You might even be the first Chinese person I've seen making this claim from the safety of the internet -- the claim is common, but generally it comes from whites who are blindly repeating what they heard somewhere.

huahaiy 10y ago
Of course reading classic Chinese requires extensive training, that's what their middle and high school educations are for. I don't know who you talked to, but if they are in college, they have passed that part of the training. They might be shamed to admit to a foreigner how much of their lives have been wasted in studying these useless things every semester. But that does not change the fact that they are trained to read classic text, because that's what the state mandates. What you do not seem to understand, is that the classic written Chinese had always been different from vernacular Chinese. This was true even for ancient times, because the classic written Chinese is NOT a record of spoken language, but a literary form, whose mastering is a prerequisite towards ascending into the aristocracy class in China.