6 ms·

Can someone familiar with Chinese language clarify one thing please: What does "Classical" mean in this case? And are the characters Simplified Chinese or Tradi

by auvi 7y ago

Can someone familiar with Chinese language clarify one thing please: What does "Classical" mean in this case? And are the characters Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese?

Aperocky 7y ago
Classical are refined Chinese used in official communication/literary record in imperial China/Korea/Japan. The grammar etc haven't really changed over 2 millenia, it is much like how Latin is to Italian/French/Spanish. Historically, they are all obviously written in traditional Chinese characters, However, you can write it in Simplified Chinese since there's usually a 1-1 mapping between Simplified Chinese / Traditional Chinese characters.
- auvi 7y ago
  Many thanks. So the characters shown in the IEEE Spectrum article, are they in Traditional Chinese? I wonder whether the implementation of the programming language covers both characters or not.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    Those are traditional Chinese characters, I have no idea if simplified characters are also supported (shouldn't be hard as it would be another symbol set, so probably) but if you're going to write classical Chinese, might as well have the full immersion.
- colorincorrect 7y ago
  your last sentence is inaccurate: an english reader cannot read any latin at all naively, but a modern chinese reader can interpret little/some/most of classical chinese, depending on the specific text in question
  - sansnomme 7y ago
    English is a weird Romantic-Germanic hybrid (Germanic by linguistic classification but with a tremendous/predominant vocabulary of Romantic origin). A more apt comparison would be with respect to a French/Italian/Spanish reader. See: Interlingua
    - colorincorrect 7y ago
      misread, my bad; but i remain suspicious because from what i've heard the latin grammar is something quite alien, but then again i heard it from an english speaker....
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        I am a native English speaker, though one with much more interest in the structure of language than average. Latin grammar isn't all that different from English grammar. It's usually possible to translate a sentence from Latin into English in a way that simultaneously preserves both the meaning and the grammatical structure of the original. Attempting to do that between unrelated languages is vastly more difficult; in such cases, a translation that tries to preserve the source grammar will usually end up being hopelessly ungrammatical in the target language. I think you're overestimating, or at least overselling, the degree to which modern Chinese people can read classical text without training.
        dwohnitmok 7y ago
        I'm actually with colorincorrect here. There's a nontrivial overlap between formal modern Chinese and Classical Chinese. This is especially evident if you ever read contemporary Chinese works about Chinese history. Large tracts of Classical Chinese are discussed without translation assuming the reader understands the text in question and often the contemporary work itself can read very classically. Modern literature can also occasionally lapse into Classical Chinese constructions for a sentence or two. And anecdotally I don't think I've ever met a Chinese high school graduate who didn't have some proficiency with Classical Chinese. I've said this before elsewhere, sometimes it's useful to think of Classical Chinese as a separate language from modern Chinese, sometimes it's useful to think of it as an extremely elevated register of modern Chinese. Modern literary works can be more or less "classical" in nature depending on the whims of the author.
- rabboRubble 7y ago
  Many, if not by most definitions, traditional characters map to 1 simplified character. Unfortunately, not all. Example, a 9 traditional : 1 simplified map 斗 ⇄ 鬥斗鬪鬦鬭鬬闘閗逗 Here's a list that probably is mostly complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_character_simplification#1_to_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_charact...
yorwba 7y ago
The characters are Traditional Chinese. The grammar is modeled after that of the literary classics written thousands of years ago. (And later works imitating that style.) In particular, it uses 是 to mean "this" instead of the verb "to be" and a bunch of characters that are not used for modern vernacular texts, like 曰 "say".
ww520 7y ago
Classical means the writing style long time ago, like 2000 years ago. The characters are definitely traditional. Classical style is noted for its brevity. In the time before paper, the writing was on bamboo slips where the real estate for words was small so the writing had to be concise and brief. A few words described a whole event, a bit like APL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_and_wooden_slips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_and_wooden_slips
colorincorrect 7y ago
"classical" chinese is the form of chinese used before around 1910's (but some texts which have the "modern style" predate this time). single obscure characters would be used to convey a complex specific meaning, a lot of the grammar and referents are implicit, structure is very dense, and in practice there would often be literary or historical references that would go over most readers ill-equipped to deal with such things. it was also fashionable to write in "symmetry", but modernists who pushed for literary reform thought a lot of this was just style over substance. "modern" chinese was developed around the 1910s as a push for modernization/literacy as influenced by western imperialism/thought spreading into china. tldr they advocated for readability/accessibility, which meant a stylistic reform of the language. if you can read modern chinese well enough, you can kinda understand about 30-80% of the meaning, depending how obtuse the text is and or when it was composed, but early chinese education (elementary school) includes some Tang poems from 600-900 AD, but is still quite readable. compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_lexicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese
- yorwba 7y ago
  > compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much It helps that ancient texts are usually not presented in the original handwriting (which has changed a lot over the millenia) and of course the writing system masks changes in pronunciation. If you speak Mandarin, try reading a text in another Sinitic language using an alphabetic writing system, e.g. a random article of the Hakka Wikipedia: https://hak.wikipedia.org/ https://hak.wikipedia.org/ Then consider how different the last common ancestor of both languages must have been.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much This is nonsense. Here's some middle english (taken from https://www.chaucermss.org/?manuscript=Dd&tale=GP&version=single&page=home https://www.chaucermss.org/?manuscript=Dd&tale=GP&version=si... ): A Millere was there / dwellyng many a day As any Pecok / he was proud and gay Pipe he coude and fisshe / and nettes bete And trne cuppes / & wel wrestel and shete Ay by his belt / he bar a long panade And of a swerd / ful trenchaūt was the blade Middle English is much more similar to modern English than Classical Chinese is to modern Chinese (of any variety), for the obvious reason that Middle English is separated from modern English by less than half the period separating Classical Chinese from modern Chinese.
tanilama 7y ago
In Chinese, people usually don't call Classical Chinese as 'Classical', instead people addressed it as 文言(Wen Yan), which roughly means the 'Written Speech' indicating it is special form of written Chinese, not spoken Chinese, which is often called 白话(Bai Hua, the Plain Speech), or Vernacular Chinese. Since WenYan is created specifically for written and rarely used for speaking, there is a unique phenomenon in Chinese called "文白分离(Wen Bai Fen Li)", means the 'the Separation of Written and Spoken Chinese'. For nowadays Chinese people, it still requires intensive learning in order to read WenYan text from the ancient time as if it is a foreign language.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > For nowadays Chinese people, it still requires intensive learning in order to read WenYan text from the ancient time as if it is a foreign language. This is true for everyone trying to read texts written in a form of their language as it existed more than 2000 years ago. You get a lot of language change in that amount of time.

by auvi 7y ago

Can someone familiar with Chinese language clarify one thing please: What does "Classical" mean in this case? And are the characters Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese?

Aperocky 7y ago

Classical are refined Chinese used in official communication/literary record in imperial China/Korea/Japan. The grammar etc haven't really changed over 2 millenia, it is much like how Latin is to Italian/French/Spanish. Historically, they are all obviously written in traditional Chinese characters, However, you can write it in Simplified Chinese since there's usually a 1-1 mapping between Simplified Chinese / Traditional Chinese characters.

auvi 7y ago
Many thanks. So the characters shown in the IEEE Spectrum article, are they in Traditional Chinese? I wonder whether the implementation of the programming language covers both characters or not.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Those are traditional Chinese characters, I have no idea if simplified characters are also supported (shouldn't be hard as it would be another symbol set, so probably) but if you're going to write classical Chinese, might as well have the full immersion.
colorincorrect 7y ago
your last sentence is inaccurate: an english reader cannot read any latin at all naively, but a modern chinese reader can interpret little/some/most of classical chinese, depending on the specific text in question
- sansnomme 7y ago
  English is a weird Romantic-Germanic hybrid (Germanic by linguistic classification but with a tremendous/predominant vocabulary of Romantic origin). A more apt comparison would be with respect to a French/Italian/Spanish reader. See: Interlingua
  - colorincorrect 7y ago
    misread, my bad; but i remain suspicious because from what i've heard the latin grammar is something quite alien, but then again i heard it from an english speaker....
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      I am a native English speaker, though one with much more interest in the structure of language than average. Latin grammar isn't all that different from English grammar. It's usually possible to translate a sentence from Latin into English in a way that simultaneously preserves both the meaning and the grammatical structure of the original. Attempting to do that between unrelated languages is vastly more difficult; in such cases, a translation that tries to preserve the source grammar will usually end up being hopelessly ungrammatical in the target language. I think you're overestimating, or at least overselling, the degree to which modern Chinese people can read classical text without training.
      - dwohnitmok 7y ago
        I'm actually with colorincorrect here. There's a nontrivial overlap between formal modern Chinese and Classical Chinese. This is especially evident if you ever read contemporary Chinese works about Chinese history. Large tracts of Classical Chinese are discussed without translation assuming the reader understands the text in question and often the contemporary work itself can read very classically. Modern literature can also occasionally lapse into Classical Chinese constructions for a sentence or two. And anecdotally I don't think I've ever met a Chinese high school graduate who didn't have some proficiency with Classical Chinese. I've said this before elsewhere, sometimes it's useful to think of Classical Chinese as a separate language from modern Chinese, sometimes it's useful to think of it as an extremely elevated register of modern Chinese. Modern literary works can be more or less "classical" in nature depending on the whims of the author.
rabboRubble 7y ago
Many, if not by most definitions, traditional characters map to 1 simplified character. Unfortunately, not all. Example, a 9 traditional : 1 simplified map 斗 ⇄ 鬥斗鬪鬦鬭鬬闘閗逗 Here's a list that probably is mostly complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_character_simplification#1_to_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_charact...

yorwba 7y ago

The characters are Traditional Chinese. The grammar is modeled after that of the literary classics written thousands of years ago. (And later works imitating that style.) In particular, it uses 是 to mean "this" instead of the verb "to be" and a bunch of characters that are not used for modern vernacular texts, like 曰 "say".

ww520 7y ago

Classical means the writing style long time ago, like 2000 years ago. The characters are definitely traditional. Classical style is noted for its brevity. In the time before paper, the writing was on bamboo slips where the real estate for words was small so the writing had to be concise and brief. A few words described a whole event, a bit like APL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_and_wooden_slips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_and_wooden_slips

colorincorrect 7y ago

"classical" chinese is the form of chinese used before around 1910's (but some texts which have the "modern style" predate this time). single obscure characters would be used to convey a complex specific meaning, a lot of the grammar and referents are implicit, structure is very dense, and in practice there would often be literary or historical references that would go over most readers ill-equipped to deal with such things. it was also fashionable to write in "symmetry", but modernists who pushed for literary reform thought a lot of this was just style over substance. "modern" chinese was developed around the 1910s as a push for modernization/literacy as influenced by western imperialism/thought spreading into china. tldr they advocated for readability/accessibility, which meant a stylistic reform of the language. if you can read modern chinese well enough, you can kinda understand about 30-80% of the meaning, depending how obtuse the text is and or when it was composed, but early chinese education (elementary school) includes some Tang poems from 600-900 AD, but is still quite readable. compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_lexicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese

yorwba 7y ago
> compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much It helps that ancient texts are usually not presented in the original handwriting (which has changed a lot over the millenia) and of course the writing system masks changes in pronunciation. If you speak Mandarin, try reading a text in another Sinitic language using an alphabetic writing system, e.g. a random article of the Hakka Wikipedia: https://hak.wikipedia.org/ https://hak.wikipedia.org/ Then consider how different the last common ancestor of both languages must have been.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much This is nonsense. Here's some middle english (taken from https://www.chaucermss.org/?manuscript=Dd&tale=GP&version=single&page=home https://www.chaucermss.org/?manuscript=Dd&tale=GP&version=si... ): A Millere was there / dwellyng many a day As any Pecok / he was proud and gay Pipe he coude and fisshe / and nettes bete And trne cuppes / & wel wrestel and shete Ay by his belt / he bar a long panade And of a swerd / ful trenchaūt was the blade Middle English is much more similar to modern English than Classical Chinese is to modern Chinese (of any variety), for the obvious reason that Middle English is separated from modern English by less than half the period separating Classical Chinese from modern Chinese.

tanilama 7y ago

In Chinese, people usually don't call Classical Chinese as 'Classical', instead people addressed it as 文言(Wen Yan), which roughly means the 'Written Speech' indicating it is special form of written Chinese, not spoken Chinese, which is often called 白话(Bai Hua, the Plain Speech), or Vernacular Chinese. Since WenYan is created specifically for written and rarely used for speaking, there is a unique phenomenon in Chinese called "文白分离(Wen Bai Fen Li)", means the 'the Separation of Written and Spoken Chinese'. For nowadays Chinese people, it still requires intensive learning in order to read WenYan text from the ancient time as if it is a foreign language.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> For nowadays Chinese people, it still requires intensive learning in order to read WenYan text from the ancient time as if it is a foreign language. This is true for everyone trying to read texts written in a form of their language as it existed more than 2000 years ago. You get a lot of language change in that amount of time.