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Thousand Character Classic
- maxrmk 3y ago> By the Song dynasty, since all literate people could be assumed to have memorized the text, the order of its characters was used to put documents in sequence in the same way that alphabetical order is used in alphabetic languages. I struggle enough with 26 letters! I genuinely can’t imagine this.
- mbivert 3y agoThere are mnemonics to help remember the characters. For example: - 嫉 (jealousy) is composed of 女 (woman) and 疾 (illness, hatred): jealousy is a feminine illness or a manifestation of feminine hatred; - 惑 (to be puzzled) is composed of 心 (heart, intention) 或 (maybe, possibility): an unsure heart; - 愚 (to be stupid) is composed of 心 (heart, intention) 禸 (trample) 田 (field): the heart of someone who tramples a field (and thus ruining the crops); etc. You often have to be creative. If I understand the research correctly[0], finding such interpretations used to be common, and different people would debate different interpretations. I've actually wrote a tool to help studying Chinese from that perspective, by allowing to read classics such as the Thousand Character Classic[1], and systematically decomposing characters. [0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf [1]: https://zhongmu.eu/book.html#c=2;w=0;b=qian-zi-wen https://zhongmu.eu/book.html#c=2;w=0;b=qian-zi-wen (~unusable on mobile screens).
- est 3y ago> I struggle enough with 26 letters! I genuinely can’t imagine this. alphabets are like x86 instructions of phonemes, Chinese scripts on the other hand is the "bytecode" of many languages (mandarin/cantonese/you-name-it). The first emperor of China unified text writing but not the pronouciations
- geraldwhen 3y agoNot true. You know uppercase, lowercase, and cursive, as well as iconography used commonly in the west for various road signs, currencies, and governments. You know flags and warning labels. Kanji is just a superset of that.
- pjc50 3y agoThere's a Languagelog blog post from years ago on the difficulties that even native speakers of Chinese languages have in looking up words in dictionaries. Collation is a serious problem.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoWhat a strange coincidence. I just picked this up in my local library about two hours ago. I just returned home now.
- sudasana 3y agoIt's difficult to overstate the importance of this and similar primer texts from this period. Every literate person not only in China but elsewhere in the Sinic reading world would have memorized this as a child. You might not speak the same language, but you could both read and write this set of 1000 characters. Was also used for a Keno-style game that spread across the Pacific! https://games.porg.es/games/pigeon-lottery/ https://games.porg.es/games/pigeon-lottery/
- est 3y ago> Every literate person not only in China but elsewhere in the Sinic reading world would have memorized this as a child Nah, 千字文 is mainly used for practice calligraphy, are you thinking of Three Character Classic (三字经) ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic
- bigcat12345678 3y agoYes, 千字文 is not common in mainland China at all. I was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory of the content of 千字文 other than the title. 三字经 on the contrary, is ubiquitous. I am guessing everyone heard of the first 2 terms of 三字经: 人之初 性本善, meaning "the human nature is good" This can be seen as a foundational psychology imprint of relatively dossile personality on every Chinese. Nowadays, I always get a vibe of Dune when reading Chinese ancient classics. What a monumental accumulation of human cultivation in those classics! Despite communism transformation, China actually get back to its traditional way of thinking and dealing with the outsiders around the world. Or a different interpretation: the conventional mandate of heaven returned, but with a communism decoration.
- kevinwang 3y ago> Yes, 千字文 is not common in mainland China at all. I was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory of the content of 千字文 other than the title. But the original content is talking about the past, not the modern era.
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- notresidenter 3y agoIt's good to know that TCC was pushed by the Chinese leaders so that their people could read but couldn't think and write independently -- those thousand characters are not enough to write anything intellectual in Chinese. Nowadays, the program expects that 3000 characters are known in the third year of primary school. A modern dictionary has 7000-8000 characters. The Shuowen (edit: Kangxi Dictionary), the dictionary used by the elite in that period to make all literary writing very hard to read by using archaic characters contained 47000. TCC is very political and symbolic. See Lu Xun's essay in Qiejie ting zawen. Could expand more on it if someone's interested. Edit: change "government" to "leaders"
- fmbb 3y agoWhich Chinese government when? These poems are supposedly 1000-1500 years old. I don’t think many governments (or kings, chieftains etc.) anywhere were very liberal back then.
- notresidenter 3y agoWhile there is a first TCC, the one from this page, the name was used and reused for new manuals, intellectuals sometimes argued that 1000 characters was all that the masses could possibly comprehend/need. At the end of the Qing dinasty, in particular, when some intellectual and political leaders were preoccupied by bringing "writing to the masses", intellectuals and great (war|) lords participated in the movements but with the sole intention of being understood by the masses without giving them the ability to express themselves. For a range, it's 1897-1911/1912.
- yorwba 3y agoThat's a rather idiosyncratic interpretation. If you want to write something rebellious insulting the emperor, 皇帝卑俗無德, the thousand characters have got you covered. Same for the intellectual first sentence of Confucius' Analects 子曰: 學而時習之, 不亦說乎? And of course people would also study other texts that would introduce them to additional vocabulary. Your character count for the Shouwen dictionary is way off, it has less than 10000 distinct characters, and its primary purpose wasn't to provide obscure characters for use in new texts, but to provide easier-to-understand definitions for characters found in old texts. A tool to ease understanding, not hinder it. I'm not sure which of Lu Xun's essays in particular you're referring to, but in general his beef was with the continued use of literary Chinese, not that people weren't being taught enough characters to write in it.
- resolutebat 3y agoThe Japanese equivalent is the Iroha, a famous poem that's also a perfect pangram of kana syllables and used as the traditional sort order for Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha Plus as a poem it slaps: Although its scent still lingers on the form of a flower has scattered away For whom will the glory of this world remain unchanged? Arriving today at the yonder side of the deep mountains of evanescent existence We shall never allow ourselves to drift away intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.
- bentley 3y agoI’m also reminded what’s almost the inverse, a Chinese poem consisting of a single repeated syllable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
- Pikamander2 3y agoStuff like this really makes me appreciate phonetic alphabets. Even if I've never seen a written word before, I can still sound it out and gain some clues on what it means. I'm surprised that Chinese never became at least a hybrid system like Japanese. Kanji can still be frustrating to learn, but it's usually mixed with hiragana/katakana and sometimes includes furigana for uncommon kanji or for texts aimed at younger readers.
- Tier3r 3y agoChinese is quasi-phonetic, the right side (or if the character is only made of one section) strongly suggests the pronunciation of character. The number I have been told by my tutor is 70% of the time it is similar. Far bigger of a problem to me seems to be how many characters are pronounced the same. I suspect that the common usage of it avoids words that sound the same and cause confusion, but it is still a problem.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThat's one style of character composition, by far the most common, but not the only one. > I suspect that the common usage of it avoids words that sound the same and cause confusion This problem is solved in modern Chinese by making most words more than one syllable long.
- lupire 3y agoEnglish also has homophones. It's challenging, but also fun. There's some tradeoff between "language complication (unnecessary complexity) impairs thinking" and "language puzzles inspire thinking".
- siraben 3y agoYes, most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds.[0] However, this makes most sense in the original Old Chinese[1] phonology, where the forms were taking place. For example, 偒 was pronounced /*l̥ʰaːŋʔ/ and 陽 was pronounced /*laŋ/, but the modern pronunciations are tǎng (/tʰɑŋ²¹⁴/) and yáng (/jɑŋ³⁵/) respectively. So the phonetic part 昜 /*laŋ/ no longer consistently represents that sound, although in this case the final -aŋ is still present. And as for sounds that were present in Old Chinese but not in Middle Chinese and Mandarin, like [2] 巽 was pronounced /*sqʰuːns/, now xùn (/ɕyn⁵¹/), they underwent a series of regular sound shifts that make them sound quite different when used in characters in Mandarin. Also, Old Chinese was not a tonal language, tones first appeared in Middle Chinese, which the modern system derives from (with changes). Tones never had a chance to appear in writing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Phono-semantic_compounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%BD https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%BD
- RaoulP 3y agoAmazing. It’s like their “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” But with no repeated characters! Although since characters are words, I guess that “room for interpretation” affords some combinatorial leniency, which you can’t get when spelling latin words.
- canjobear 3y agoIt's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of", "is". And just to show off, the Qianziwen holds a bunch of those words for the very last line!
- throw0101a 3y ago> It's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of", "is". How about: > Gadsby is a [260-page] 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright which includes only four words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
- chris_st 3y agoOr: > [The novel] "A Void", translated from the original French La Disparition (lit. "The Disappearance"), is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
- lupire 3y agoLa Disparition / A void isn't just "without using that fifth glyph"; it's about a world without that fifth glyph, and uncanny discomfort from not having it but not knowing why, and trying to find illuminating truth. Also, http://reddit.com/r/AVoid5 http://reddit.com/r/AVoid5 If you don't want to visit that community, you can ask ChatGPT for non-fifth-glyph writing, most of which looks as if it is a copy from that community.
- eru 3y agoStrangely, they don't say anything about a translation into English.
- userbinator 3y agoGoogle tried its best but not surprisingly doesn't work well on poetry; it begins with "The sky and the earth are dark and yellow, and the universe is primitive. Covering this body and hair are the four elements and five constant elements." And contains such amusements as: "Gong Wei Ju Yang, how dare you damage it." "It clears up confusion and benefits customs, and everything is wonderful." "Upgraded to accept the emperor, turned into a star of doubt." "The world is luxurious and rich, and the car is fat and light."
- samus 3y agoIt doesn't help that many of these characters are not in frequent use anymore, which means that the translation model has been trained with way less sentences involving them. Others' usage pattern have shifted, or they picked up many additional meanings over the millenia, and the translation model is probably not savvy enough to ignore all the modern ones. With "modern" meaning everything after like 200 A.D.
- sudasana 3y agoThis text only dates to the 6th century CE
- canjobear 3y agoChatGPT's got it. Yo, listen up, as I paint the universe broad and deep, Sky's dark, Earth's yellow, secrets ancient they keep. This life, this hair, rooted in the core, Four elements, five virtues, what we livin' for. Cities shining, from east to west we're ruling, Grounded in the earth, it's agriculture we're schooling. Lose yourself in books or market's charm, Life's treasures, keep close, safe from harm. Sun and moon, their dance of light and dark, Nature's cycle, in harmony, leaves its mark. Respect for life, ain't no damage done, From mountains high to rivers deep, under the same sun. etc.