4 ms·

You do realize that "Lower"/低 Is a verb right? In fact if you look at the complete poem every line contains a verb except the first one. The full poem is: 床前明月

by knolax 7y ago

You do realize that "Lower"/低 Is a verb right? In fact if you look at the complete poem every line contains a verb except the first one. The full poem is: 床前明月光 Bright明 Moon月light光 before前 (the) bed床. 疑是地下霜 (The) suspicion疑 is是 frost霜 on下 (the) ground地. Verb: 是/Is 举头望明月 Raise举 head头, gaze望 (the) bright明 moon月. Verb: 举/Raise 低头思故乡 Lower低 head头, think思 (of) (the) homeland故乡. Verb: 低/Lower Quoted words are those not present in the poem. Chinese, like most languages doesn't have a definite article so "the" is implicit. The last "of" isn't present because "homeland"/故乡 is the object of the word think in Chinese where as the topic of a thought is usually marked with a preposition in English. The above was a word for word translation where only the order of words were changed. If you haven't noticed already, the last two lines literally translate to English in the same order (save for the lack of pronouns). The only thing missing are pronouns, which also occurs in English with the passive voice. 静夜思 By the way literally doesn't deviate in any way from "vernacular" Chinese in terms of grammar or vocabulary. In fact it's taught in early grade school and is easily understood. > the written language often cannot be understood when read aloud unless the listeners are already familiar with the passage and what this means in turn is that the written language should probably not be seen as a transcription of speech I'm sorry but this is nonsense. I learned the poem you mentioned before I knew how to read or write and understood it fine. On the flip side, I didn't know what the pledge of allegiance meant until I learned how to read/write. Differences between formal and casual registers exist in every language, there is no indication that this is any different in Chinese. Your example of "abbreviating words" also makes zero sense when the "parts of words" you refer to are atomic and have meaning by themselves. DeFrancis makes his wild claims about Chinese because he believed that all writing was ultimately phonetic when it's clear that all writing is logographic, which is the case for both Chinese and English. I'm tired of the mysticism that people display towards Chinese when arguably it has few difference from English.

posterboy 7y ago
You are basically saying that your understanding as a kid of a classical poetry was well developed. You understood the surface analysis, but I very much doubt that you had grasped any symbolism past the literal bright disk in the sky. You are potentially biased by native speaker instinct. What you understand just fine is only what you think it means. This is called identification. This does not give you authority over the interpretation. To everyone else the phrases look almost like gibberish, to the point that a lot deeper meaning is expected than the surface is letting on. They (read: I) do not really identify with, but reject it. You very apparently did not read the post very clearly that you cite. You responded to "the written language often cannot be understood when read aloud". However you did not finish reading before anger blinded your sight. It goes on "cannot be understood when read aloud unless the listeners are already familiar with the passage". It would be easy enough to criticize that this is a paradox situation. However it goes on further, "what this means in turn is that the written language should probably not be seen as a transcription of speech", which implies to me that the deeper sense is encoded in the signs themselves. I'd add that poetry thrives in word play. In general, the older the poem, the obscurer the word play, and yet most innocious the surface form for it to survive. Although, it might be that the verse is really just esthetically pleasing on a phonetical level, I wouldn't know (and GP would have mislead me). That is, a lot of old poetry starts verbally and is written down only generations later Word play on the graphemic level is a dimension well known in English from signage. But the combination with sound adds a constraint that's hard to imagine. "Speaking signs" (The city of Hamburg having a Burg "castle" on their emblem) are often banal, but can escalate over many levels of connotation (one level: The castle's gates are depicted open or shut depending on the times; Many levels: The background is red, the castle is white? A tavern may play on it and add a pork, because "ham"). I believe that's what they were trying to say. I expect that is something you must be aware of subliminally because there is no way to learn chinese signs well without a theory of composition. If you really only learn the geometric forms, I'd be disappointed. 望 for example has the sign for moon up-right, and emperor down-low, if I recal correctly. The latter also means tenno in Japanese and has some relation to sky (or the forbidden city in Peking) and high up, though up would be one stroke less (cp "[up]on", "raise"'s lower half, and its mirror image in "ground"'s left and "lower"'s right; I gather "is" may be "wall, stand, up; set in place); Also cp "head" ("top"?). The phonetics are often shown by only one of the radicals or none at all, so the symbolism can be easy to miss in speech, although the connotation may be obvious from common context, precisely such as this poem, if the semantics remained stable. In fact the poem might be an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing. I am aware that's not quite what was being talked about. Not to mention that the symbolism of "is" has not been convincingly by scholars. It is elsewhere rather translated as "that", by the way, which is not withstanding insofar is that or that is are fixed collocations, that might well fuse to one word "that's", too. Word is that winter's coming. In times of stability at the end of the year as the evening star rises I like to think it's time to crawl before the lord, ask for allowance, and bring home my yen to support my family and spend time with them over the year's end. Indeed, English is no different. Just why is beowulf ostensibly "bee wolf = bear"? Also, the second to last part where you say English is logographic confuses me.
- dwohnitmok 7y ago
  Actually I'd argue that a theory of composition of Chinese is somewhat overrated. It really only makes sense for the common list of Chinese radicals. It may be useful as a device for remembering characters, but the explanations each person comes up with are bound to be idiosyncratic. For example, you seem to be implying a connection between the meanings of 王 (king) and 上 (up) based on their graphical similarity. This is purely an artifact of regular script, one of several different scripts for Chinese. This similarity goes away entirely in older scripts and cursive scripts. In general graphical analysis of modern Chinese script is usually extremely misleading and to do accurately often requires an extraordinarily convoluted process. I would not recommend it as a way of formally analyzing Chinese. Through the repeated process of phonetic borrowing (taking a character similar in sound to an unrelated word and using it to represent that word as well); changes in Chinese script over the millennia; variant characters that have been consolidated, split up, and re-consolidated; variant meanings that have been consolidated into a single character, split up into separate characters, and re-consolidated; erroneous interpretations of character structure between different iterations of Chinese scripts; and normal semantic drift of words over time, it is often maddening to divine the meaning of Chinese characters from their graphical forms that is any more specific than the usual context offered by a Chinese radical. This also means that ancient Chinese doesn't have too many graphical puns. There are isolated examples e.g. where these puns are only used to get around prohibitions on certain characters (e.g. characters used in an emperor's name could not be written for the duration of that emperor's rule, so graphical puns would occasionally be employed). This persists in modern Chinese where to get around some censorship, graphical puns are employed. Likewise, I am very skeptical of viewing the poem as an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing. Just writing it in a different script changes a lot of the graphical structure! There are no commentators I know of, Chinese or otherwise, that even attempt to analyze the graphical structure of the characters in the poem. Graphical analyses really only have value for the earliest stages of Chinese writing (oracle bone script and to some degree bronze script). And even then things are painful, especially because the idea that a word is identifiable with its character starts to fall apart. You start having to think harder about whether a single character is meant to stand-in for several words or whether multiple characters all can be used for a single word.
dang 7y ago
> I'm sorry but this is nonsense. > I'm tired of the mysticism that people display Would you please make your substantive points without indignant swipes? They degrade discussion, it's not hard to do without them, and your comments will be better for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by knolax 7y ago

posterboy 7y ago

You are basically saying that your understanding as a kid of a classical poetry was well developed. You understood the surface analysis, but I very much doubt that you had grasped any symbolism past the literal bright disk in the sky. You are potentially biased by native speaker instinct. What you understand just fine is only what you think it means. This is called identification. This does not give you authority over the interpretation. To everyone else the phrases look almost like gibberish, to the point that a lot deeper meaning is expected than the surface is letting on. They (read: I) do not really identify with, but reject it. You very apparently did not read the post very clearly that you cite. You responded to "the written language often cannot be understood when read aloud". However you did not finish reading before anger blinded your sight. It goes on "cannot be understood when read aloud unless the listeners are already familiar with the passage". It would be easy enough to criticize that this is a paradox situation. However it goes on further, "what this means in turn is that the written language should probably not be seen as a transcription of speech", which implies to me that the deeper sense is encoded in the signs themselves. I'd add that poetry thrives in word play. In general, the older the poem, the obscurer the word play, and yet most innocious the surface form for it to survive. Although, it might be that the verse is really just esthetically pleasing on a phonetical level, I wouldn't know (and GP would have mislead me). That is, a lot of old poetry starts verbally and is written down only generations later Word play on the graphemic level is a dimension well known in English from signage. But the combination with sound adds a constraint that's hard to imagine. "Speaking signs" (The city of Hamburg having a Burg "castle" on their emblem) are often banal, but can escalate over many levels of connotation (one level: The castle's gates are depicted open or shut depending on the times; Many levels: The background is red, the castle is white? A tavern may play on it and add a pork, because "ham"). I believe that's what they were trying to say. I expect that is something you must be aware of subliminally because there is no way to learn chinese signs well without a theory of composition. If you really only learn the geometric forms, I'd be disappointed. 望 for example has the sign for moon up-right, and emperor down-low, if I recal correctly. The latter also means tenno in Japanese and has some relation to sky (or the forbidden city in Peking) and high up, though up would be one stroke less (cp "[up]on", "raise"'s lower half, and its mirror image in "ground"'s left and "lower"'s right; I gather "is" may be "wall, stand, up; set in place); Also cp "head" ("top"?). The phonetics are often shown by only one of the radicals or none at all, so the symbolism can be easy to miss in speech, although the connotation may be obvious from common context, precisely such as this poem, if the semantics remained stable. In fact the poem might be an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing. I am aware that's not quite what was being talked about. Not to mention that the symbolism of "is" has not been convincingly by scholars. It is elsewhere rather translated as "that", by the way, which is not withstanding insofar is that or that is are fixed collocations, that might well fuse to one word "that's", too. Word is that winter's coming. In times of stability at the end of the year as the evening star rises I like to think it's time to crawl before the lord, ask for allowance, and bring home my yen to support my family and spend time with them over the year's end. Indeed, English is no different. Just why is beowulf ostensibly "bee wolf = bear"? Also, the second to last part where you say English is logographic confuses me.

dwohnitmok 7y ago
Actually I'd argue that a theory of composition of Chinese is somewhat overrated. It really only makes sense for the common list of Chinese radicals. It may be useful as a device for remembering characters, but the explanations each person comes up with are bound to be idiosyncratic. For example, you seem to be implying a connection between the meanings of 王 (king) and 上 (up) based on their graphical similarity. This is purely an artifact of regular script, one of several different scripts for Chinese. This similarity goes away entirely in older scripts and cursive scripts. In general graphical analysis of modern Chinese script is usually extremely misleading and to do accurately often requires an extraordinarily convoluted process. I would not recommend it as a way of formally analyzing Chinese. Through the repeated process of phonetic borrowing (taking a character similar in sound to an unrelated word and using it to represent that word as well); changes in Chinese script over the millennia; variant characters that have been consolidated, split up, and re-consolidated; variant meanings that have been consolidated into a single character, split up into separate characters, and re-consolidated; erroneous interpretations of character structure between different iterations of Chinese scripts; and normal semantic drift of words over time, it is often maddening to divine the meaning of Chinese characters from their graphical forms that is any more specific than the usual context offered by a Chinese radical. This also means that ancient Chinese doesn't have too many graphical puns. There are isolated examples e.g. where these puns are only used to get around prohibitions on certain characters (e.g. characters used in an emperor's name could not be written for the duration of that emperor's rule, so graphical puns would occasionally be employed). This persists in modern Chinese where to get around some censorship, graphical puns are employed. Likewise, I am very skeptical of viewing the poem as an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing. Just writing it in a different script changes a lot of the graphical structure! There are no commentators I know of, Chinese or otherwise, that even attempt to analyze the graphical structure of the characters in the poem. Graphical analyses really only have value for the earliest stages of Chinese writing (oracle bone script and to some degree bronze script). And even then things are painful, especially because the idea that a word is identifiable with its character starts to fall apart. You start having to think harder about whether a single character is meant to stand-in for several words or whether multiple characters all can be used for a single word.

dang 7y ago

> I'm sorry but this is nonsense. > I'm tired of the mysticism that people display Would you please make your substantive points without indignant swipes? They degrade discussion, it's not hard to do without them, and your comments will be better for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html