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The Tao Te Ching is not written in Mandarin but in Old Chinese. The two are as different, and stand in roughly the same relationship, as Latin and French. These

The Tao Te Ching is not written in Mandarin but in Old Chinese. The two are as different, and stand in roughly the same relationship, as Latin and French. These differences include all levels of the language: phonology, syntax, lexicon, and what morphology the Sinitic languages have. In commentaries, the characters of Old Chinese words are sonetimes glossed with their modern Mandarin sound values, but this is ahistorical and often misleading. The Chinese classics are not accessible to ordinary Chinese without special training. That is why the early 20th century campaign to write in the spoken language instead of fossilized literary languages, made such a huge impact on literacy in China.

yorwba 3y ago
Mandarin was just as inaccessible to speakers of other Sinitic languages without special training, but they do not appear to have been left behind in the literacy push, suggesting to me that it was pushing for mass literacy in the first place that did it (effectively providing the necessary special training), rather than the specific choice of language to push.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  From the Middle Chinese stage on, the Sinitic languages have more in common with each other than any of them does with Old Chinese, inasmuch as they have all lost the Old Chinese inflections, with all the consequences for syntax that that entails.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    AFAIK, Old Chinese is not generally considered to have been an inflected language. Maybe you're thinking about derivational affixes like nominalizing -s, that were not indicated in writing (giving two different pronunciations for the same character) and subsequently disappeared due to sound changes (but still leaving different pronunciations behind, which is how the existence of the affix was reconstructed). I do agree that all modern Sinitic languages have changed greatly compared to the Old Chinese period, but that doesn't mean they have more in common as a result; on the contrary, different changes in different regions made all of them more dissimilar from each other. There are some commonalities that spread through contact between neighboring varieties, but there are also commonalities resulting from the continued study of classic texts.
uoaei 3y ago
Thanks for clarifying, shows my naivete even here.

yorwba 3y ago

Mandarin was just as inaccessible to speakers of other Sinitic languages without special training, but they do not appear to have been left behind in the literacy push, suggesting to me that it was pushing for mass literacy in the first place that did it (effectively providing the necessary special training), rather than the specific choice of language to push.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
From the Middle Chinese stage on, the Sinitic languages have more in common with each other than any of them does with Old Chinese, inasmuch as they have all lost the Old Chinese inflections, with all the consequences for syntax that that entails.
- yorwba 3y ago
  AFAIK, Old Chinese is not generally considered to have been an inflected language. Maybe you're thinking about derivational affixes like nominalizing -s, that were not indicated in writing (giving two different pronunciations for the same character) and subsequently disappeared due to sound changes (but still leaving different pronunciations behind, which is how the existence of the affix was reconstructed). I do agree that all modern Sinitic languages have changed greatly compared to the Old Chinese period, but that doesn't mean they have more in common as a result; on the contrary, different changes in different regions made all of them more dissimilar from each other. There are some commonalities that spread through contact between neighboring varieties, but there are also commonalities resulting from the continued study of classic texts.

uoaei 3y ago

Thanks for clarifying, shows my naivete even here.