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There's an additional barrier when it comes to classical Chinese: Written Chinese underwent a vernacular revolution in the early to mid 20th century to make it

There's an additional barrier when it comes to classical Chinese: Written Chinese underwent a vernacular revolution in the early to mid 20th century to make it comprehensible to more people but until then written Chinese is nothing like what spoken Chinese is like (my guess is that because written Chinese started with ideogram rather than phonetics). You can still see some examples of this when you encounter something formal in Chinese like wedding invitations. Despite being fluent in more than one dialect of Chinese and having some reading fluency, formal Chinese is incomprehensible to me. Or take for example: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch1 https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch1 Even if you can't read Chinese, note the regularity of sentence/phrase lengths between commas, etc. People don't talk like that. And this is a work of fiction, not philosophy. It's meant to be consumed as a popular work by the educated. Or Art of War: https://ctext.org/art-of-war/laying-plans https://ctext.org/art-of-war/laying-plans Although being a military manual, it wasn't really meant to be easily read. Historically, written Chinese was the realm of the well educated Chinese, not meant for the masses.

dwohnitmok 7y ago
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not a great example. The particular section you've linked to is a Classical Chinese poem quoted in the introduction to the novel. The rest of the book is (for the most part) written in Ming Dynasty vernacular Chinese (although it sometimes veers into a quite formal vernacular) and is actually kind of close-ish to formal modern Mandarin. The 20th century vernacular revolution didn't mean that written Chinese was exclusively Classical Chinese previously. All the famous novels of China (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, etc) are all written in the vernacular of their time. It is nonetheless true that the overwhelming majority of writing that was not literature was written in Classical Chinese. As a side note, I would also rate Art of War as fairly readable (for a modern reader) Classical Chinese. Its excerpts are usually assigned at a middle school level in China. So "wasn't really meant to be easily read" feels a bit like a stretch. It is far easier to read (at least for me) than something like the Analects or the Daodejing. Classical Chinese still influences Chinese written works today. In order to fully understand modern Chinese literature, newspapers, legal documents, essentially anything at a register more formal than everyday Chinese, bits and pieces of Classical Chinese will filter through, to the point that I'd argue most readers of modern Chinese will gain a rudimentary understanding of Classical Chinese from reading the modern Chinese corpus.

dwohnitmok 7y ago

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not a great example. The particular section you've linked to is a Classical Chinese poem quoted in the introduction to the novel. The rest of the book is (for the most part) written in Ming Dynasty vernacular Chinese (although it sometimes veers into a quite formal vernacular) and is actually kind of close-ish to formal modern Mandarin. The 20th century vernacular revolution didn't mean that written Chinese was exclusively Classical Chinese previously. All the famous novels of China (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, etc) are all written in the vernacular of their time. It is nonetheless true that the overwhelming majority of writing that was not literature was written in Classical Chinese. As a side note, I would also rate Art of War as fairly readable (for a modern reader) Classical Chinese. Its excerpts are usually assigned at a middle school level in China. So "wasn't really meant to be easily read" feels a bit like a stretch. It is far easier to read (at least for me) than something like the Analects or the Daodejing. Classical Chinese still influences Chinese written works today. In order to fully understand modern Chinese literature, newspapers, legal documents, essentially anything at a register more formal than everyday Chinese, bits and pieces of Classical Chinese will filter through, to the point that I'd argue most readers of modern Chinese will gain a rudimentary understanding of Classical Chinese from reading the modern Chinese corpus.