4 ms·

Just 'English with Hanzi'

86 points by scour 7mo ago

ggm 7mo ago
An article for those who read both because none of the grammatical exemplars are really explained. You have to take his word for it without transliteration or explanation.
- picture 7mo ago
  Probably true. Though as someone who can read both English and Chinese, I thought the translations in the article does a good job of representing the traditional vs modern grammar styles. Not sure what more explanation would be necessary
- agency 7mo ago
  Did you want the article to teach you read Classical Chinese?
cwnyth 7mo ago
> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” Two observations. One, I see this in Thai, too, which might yet preserve that earlier syntax. ไม่เผ็ด ไม่กิน ("No spicy, no eat") is perfectly fine in Thai, though it is possible (and very unidiomatic) to create a formal conditional using เพราะ ("because"). Two, it's also true that ancient languages in general have a different logic to their syntax than their modern descendants. I've always felt it was easier to read and understand academic French than ancient Latin, despite having much less training in the former than the latter. There is probably a shift that happens, that isn't always deliberate, when speakers of a language encounter a radically different world than one they were born into. And add contact to that: the author write of creolization, though it's not only about vocabulary and syntax. That's the just the visible. It's often about changing how we perceive things. To return to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types.
- contingencies 7mo ago
  Tai languages are a completely different language family to Chinese, written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred. By contrast, Chinese has an uninterrupted written history spanning thousands of years with world leading poetry, philosophy and science. In terms of historical and linguistic nuance, comparing the two on the basis of an excluded adverb is like eating a banana and declaring it tree-rice. (Re: child as can't post reply - Assam was always effectively surrounded by larger empires (Tibet, Myanmar, Bengal/Pala/northern India) and a disease-ridden tropical backwater so I guess its cultural and political fate was always to be dominated by larger outside influences. Actually IIRC there's some linguistic history in the Taic languages that Ahom influence moved eastward through Myanmar. If you look at the geography (much wider spaces) it makes sense that you'd shift focus to richer climes. Perhaps much as the south Indian seafarers who contributed so critically to Cambodia saw it as a vast and wealthy land with geographic echoes of home.)
  - selimthegrim 7mo ago
    I wonder if that’s what led to original Assamese dying out.
    - BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
      Wiki says Assamese has 15 million speakers. Maybe it "died out" in the same way old English did?
      - selimthegrim 7mo ago
        I’m talking about Tai Ahom.
  - BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
    > written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred I agree that Thai is in a completely different language family than Chinese, but I don't see what this quoted bit has to do with anything. (And surely it would apply just as well to their neighbors to the west, who do speak a Sino-Tibetan language)
idreyn 7mo ago
> He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu) I can't help but think of this classic essay about Java OOP: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...
picture 7mo ago
> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” Interestingly the "traditional grammar" is much more conversational and natural, while the latter is expected for modern written work.
- Apocryphon 7mo ago
  I don’t think there’s an inherent modern bias against the laconic traditional style. It actually sounds more in line with the simple sentences children learn in grade school. Really, that ‘traditional’ version is only missing a noun for the second part and then that’s sufficient for modern use. Could remove the last character, even.
- naniwaduni 7mo ago
  The latter sounds absurd, nearly as ridiculous as the English it was translated from.
woolion 7mo ago
There is a similar path with Chinese painting. The language of painting was refined over millennia, but the last 2 centuries caused an extremely rapid integration of Western influences. This article is interesting because language is like water to a fish, the invisible medium humans live through. Since art is more 'foreign' and 'superfluous', the change were more obvious and there was much more debate regarding this evolution than in linguistics. I discussed with a painter in the artistic lineage of Shi Guoliang, and he told me he remembered how much that could be seen as "Western art painted with a Chinese brush". I think the criticism was more directed towards such painters than say the Lingnan school that explicitly sought to revitalize Chinese painting through foreign influences, because it's really in the foundations of the painting -- how perspective and light are tackled through the 'scientific' system rather than the elaborate symbolic system of classical painting.
BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
How do we know this isn't just a difference in register? Classical Chinese was extremely literary, but did people actually speak that way?
- ivanbakel 7mo ago
  This is a point I was also wondering the whole time. The vulgarisation of literature happened all over Europe at varifying times and in different stages. We don’t see these as changes in the language itself, but instead the authors daring to write the way they actually always spoke. There’s something in bemoaning the loss of a poetic register in written language, but that’s a different and much less significant change.
  - projektfu 7mo ago
    As I understand it, Classical Chinese literature has long been inscrutable and full of references to other texts, requiring a tutor to explain everything as you read it, who learned from a tutor, and so on.
- canjobear 7mo ago
  That's exactly what it is. The article is almost entirely misconceived.
raincole 7mo ago
> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” No, what? Most native speakers today definitely say things like “雨大，不去了” in daily conversations. > Take his most famous poem, Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again (再别康桥). In Classical Chinese, a farewell to a river might be compressed into four dense characters: Liu shui, li ren (流水，离人 | Flowing water, departing person). But Xu wrote: > (轻轻的我走了，正如我轻轻的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩) Sorry, it's just stupid. Yes, Xu's poetry style is heavily influenced by European languages. However it doesn't mean this is equivalent to "流水，离人."
- raincole 7mo ago
  > The constant use of “I” (Wo) is a modern invention; classical poetry usually omits the subject to create a universal feeling. 我(Wo, "I") has been constantly used for a very very long time. Just less in poetry. For example, this is from early 19th century[0]: >> 嫣娘答應著，出來三步兩步，連忙跑到園裡，一進門就高聲說道：「我回來了，我可也回來了！」 This is from Journey to The West, 16th century: >> 我等在此，恐作耍成真，或驚動人王，或有禽王、獸王認此犯頭，說我們操兵造反，興師來相殺，汝等都是竹竿木刀，如何對敵？須得鋒利劍戟方可。如今奈何？ This is allegedly more than 2,000 years(!) old[1]: >> 帝力於我何有哉 Actually, there are pronouns specifically created for western text: - 她 (she) - 妳 (female you, no longer used in mainland China) - 祂 (originally this character was only used for He and Him in the Bible). The author mentioning 我 instead of these makes me question how knowledgeable this article is. [0]: https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E9%A2%A8%E6%9C%88%E9%91%91/04 https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E9%A2%A8%E6%9C%88%E9%91%9... [1]: https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E6%93%8A%E5%A3%A4%E6%AD%8C https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E6%93%8A%E5%A3%A4%E6%AD%8...
  - connorboyle 7mo ago
    >> 我等在此... This is also an example of a plural suffix ("-等") which the post author paints as English/Western influence (specifically "-们")
    - raincole 7mo ago
      Even 們 was used in Journey to The West all the time. I really don't know where the author got the idea that plural suffix is something from English. Perhaps this whole article is AI-generated.
AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
why use many word when few word do trick?
Apocryphon 7mo ago
I wonder how this accounts for regionalisms, let alone different Chinese dialects. Taiwanese Mandarin uses 研究 as a verb easily enough.
underlipton 7mo ago
I'll read this when it's written by a human.
egeozcan 7mo ago
I'm not one of those AI haters, and as long as you give it enough love, I have nothing against the usage of AI in blog posts. Actually, I'm even quite disappointed that I'm not allowed use AI to correct my grammar here anymore. That said, this has so much fill-words and weird section titles that reading becomes torture. Not to mention the lack of sources.
- userbinator 7mo ago
  There's a whole spectrum between "full AI slop" and "no AI usage". This article is far towards the former.
- em-bee 7mo ago
  incidentally i just made this argument in another forum: whether a text has substance isn't important to me. what is more important is whether the text reflects the author's thoughts, whether it is original or authentic. an AI-generated text doesn't do that. i want to talk to a real person, not someone enhanced by AI. (let me get this out of the way, that's why i also don't like makeup. apart from special cases or situations, i consider the necessity of makeup to be able to present oneself in public like a mask that hides the real person behind it.) when i engage with a topic, my engagement is with the person behind the text, not the text itself. if someone writes their texts with AI, then i can no longer recognize the real person behind it. i can no longer see which arguments in the text are important to the author, and what are the author's own opinions. the purpose of a dialogue with a person is to get to know that person better and to develop a shared understanding of a topic. that's not possible with an AI-generated text. i can neither get to know the person behind it, nor can i see how their understanding develops. there's a high risk that the person doesn't understand everything the AI says. (this text was originally written in german, then machine translated but manually edited for style (replaced expressions that i would not use myself))
dirteater_ 7mo ago
The biggest shift in the past ~100 years or so was the fact that mass-literacy became a thing. People started writing how they speak. The written language's disconnect from the spoken language had a bunch of different reasons: bridging the gap between mutually-unintelligible regional dialects, political gatekeeping, etc. I think the main claim of "Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage" owes a lot to the fact that they're two "subject verb object" languages with similar formal/written registers.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
yorwba 7mo ago
This article seems to completely ignore the fact that languages change over time on their own and attributes all differences between Literary Chinese and Modern Standard Chinese to contact with European languages, which is rather excessive. Lu Xun was interested in translation, but he was even more interested in writing for the common folk, i.e. not in some relexified foreign language. There are definitely some innovations that were originally used in translations (e.g. different characters for gendered pronouns that are pronounced identically) and of course there are loanwords, but I think most of the claims about grammar are false.
- contingencies 7mo ago
  Fun fact: Luxun proposed dropping Hanzi entirely. The communist party conveniently forgets to teach that part to the youth because it doesn't fit their nationalist narrative.
  - canjobear 7mo ago
    Even more than that: Romanization was the official goal of the Communist party until Stalin talked them out of it! https://faroutliers.com/2004/04/24/how-stalin-and-the-cultural-revolution-preserved-a-chinese-tradition/ https://faroutliers.com/2004/04/24/how-stalin-and-the-cultur...
    - contingencies 7mo ago
      Nice! Didn't know that. I wonder if they Romanized transliterated 'Vissarionovich' as a test case. Regardless, with pinyin they certainly did a better job than the Taiwanese! Pretty chilling evidence for the emergence of post-revolution Mandarin as newspeak, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
      - justaboutanyone 7mo ago
        While pinyin might be "better", there's still a lot of room for something better than it
luyu_wu 7mo ago
This article seems overly critical trying to impose a stance. I have never heard anyone say "因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了". > The Sausage Sentence: English stacks relative clauses. Modern Chinese attempts to shove that complexity into a single pre-noun modifier using de (的), creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory. This is given without any evidence. "Creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory" sounds like something Claude might write. IMO, 的 is far from as negative as the author (or AI) portrays it; arguably better than the multitude of English synonyms (his, her, theirs, its).
- canjobear 7mo ago
  In any case, Classical Chinese did the same thing but with 之.
canjobear 7mo ago
The article is mistaken on a number of linguistic points. For example 们 was used to mark plurals way before some 19th century translation, if you look at things that were written in the vernacular and not in Classical Chinese.
- krackers 7mo ago
  It's AI generated, so it's no wonder the facts are a bit off.
  - QuesnayJr 7mo ago
    AI tends towards regurgitating conventional wisdom. I suspect if it was written using AI it required some bullying to get it to go alone.
zapzupnz 7mo ago
Where are the sources? These seem like huge assertions to make without citing a single source.
remywang 7mo ago
There's so much wrong with this article. For starters, no one speaks Classical Chinese/Wenyanwen. Not now, not ever. It was designed for writing only, and the conciseness was to preserve bamboo (but stayed because it conveyed a sense of authority). Most importantly, modern Chinese remains challenging after all of the "westernization" events used as examples in the article, and the difficulty is not just because you get a new set of characters. On top of the writing system, you need to learn the tones, new phonemes like x, zh, q, and an entirely new vocabulary that shares very little cognates with English. And the grammar is different, with Chinese relying on much less conduction and requires much more context to understand.
try-working 7mo ago
> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” I would say "下雨了，我不去“ or something like that. The second example is perhaps what a language learner would say in order to "speak correctly", but nobody actually speaks or writes like that.
- thenthenthen 7mo ago
  Totally. I also feel such a disconnect with HSK material, no one speaks like that or even uses that vocabulary. But I guess thats the case with almost every language/language course.
nxobject 7mo ago
Luckily, we can omit needless words... but AI hasn't integrated Strunk and White into SOUL.md yet.

86 points by scour 7mo ago

ggm 7mo ago

An article for those who read both because none of the grammatical exemplars are really explained. You have to take his word for it without transliteration or explanation.

picture 7mo ago
Probably true. Though as someone who can read both English and Chinese, I thought the translations in the article does a good job of representing the traditional vs modern grammar styles. Not sure what more explanation would be necessary
agency 7mo ago
Did you want the article to teach you read Classical Chinese?

cwnyth 7mo ago

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” Two observations. One, I see this in Thai, too, which might yet preserve that earlier syntax. ไม่เผ็ด ไม่กิน ("No spicy, no eat") is perfectly fine in Thai, though it is possible (and very unidiomatic) to create a formal conditional using เพราะ ("because"). Two, it's also true that ancient languages in general have a different logic to their syntax than their modern descendants. I've always felt it was easier to read and understand academic French than ancient Latin, despite having much less training in the former than the latter. There is probably a shift that happens, that isn't always deliberate, when speakers of a language encounter a radically different world than one they were born into. And add contact to that: the author write of creolization, though it's not only about vocabulary and syntax. That's the just the visible. It's often about changing how we perceive things. To return to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types.

contingencies 7mo ago
Tai languages are a completely different language family to Chinese, written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred. By contrast, Chinese has an uninterrupted written history spanning thousands of years with world leading poetry, philosophy and science. In terms of historical and linguistic nuance, comparing the two on the basis of an excluded adverb is like eating a banana and declaring it tree-rice. (Re: child as can't post reply - Assam was always effectively surrounded by larger empires (Tibet, Myanmar, Bengal/Pala/northern India) and a disease-ridden tropical backwater so I guess its cultural and political fate was always to be dominated by larger outside influences. Actually IIRC there's some linguistic history in the Taic languages that Ahom influence moved eastward through Myanmar. If you look at the geography (much wider spaces) it makes sense that you'd shift focus to richer climes. Perhaps much as the south Indian seafarers who contributed so critically to Cambodia saw it as a vast and wealthy land with geographic echoes of home.)
- selimthegrim 7mo ago
  I wonder if that’s what led to original Assamese dying out.
  - BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
    Wiki says Assamese has 15 million speakers. Maybe it "died out" in the same way old English did?
    - selimthegrim 7mo ago
      I’m talking about Tai Ahom.
- BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
  > written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred I agree that Thai is in a completely different language family than Chinese, but I don't see what this quoted bit has to do with anything. (And surely it would apply just as well to their neighbors to the west, who do speak a Sino-Tibetan language)

idreyn 7mo ago

> He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu) I can't help but think of this classic essay about Java OOP: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

picture 7mo ago

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” Interestingly the "traditional grammar" is much more conversational and natural, while the latter is expected for modern written work.

Apocryphon 7mo ago
I don’t think there’s an inherent modern bias against the laconic traditional style. It actually sounds more in line with the simple sentences children learn in grade school. Really, that ‘traditional’ version is only missing a noun for the second part and then that’s sufficient for modern use. Could remove the last character, even.
naniwaduni 7mo ago
The latter sounds absurd, nearly as ridiculous as the English it was translated from.

woolion 7mo ago

There is a similar path with Chinese painting. The language of painting was refined over millennia, but the last 2 centuries caused an extremely rapid integration of Western influences. This article is interesting because language is like water to a fish, the invisible medium humans live through. Since art is more 'foreign' and 'superfluous', the change were more obvious and there was much more debate regarding this evolution than in linguistics. I discussed with a painter in the artistic lineage of Shi Guoliang, and he told me he remembered how much that could be seen as "Western art painted with a Chinese brush". I think the criticism was more directed towards such painters than say the Lingnan school that explicitly sought to revitalize Chinese painting through foreign influences, because it's really in the foundations of the painting -- how perspective and light are tackled through the 'scientific' system rather than the elaborate symbolic system of classical painting.

BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago

How do we know this isn't just a difference in register? Classical Chinese was extremely literary, but did people actually speak that way?

ivanbakel 7mo ago
This is a point I was also wondering the whole time. The vulgarisation of literature happened all over Europe at varifying times and in different stages. We don’t see these as changes in the language itself, but instead the authors daring to write the way they actually always spoke. There’s something in bemoaning the loss of a poetic register in written language, but that’s a different and much less significant change.
- projektfu 7mo ago
  As I understand it, Classical Chinese literature has long been inscrutable and full of references to other texts, requiring a tutor to explain everything as you read it, who learned from a tutor, and so on.
canjobear 7mo ago
That's exactly what it is. The article is almost entirely misconceived.

raincole 7mo ago

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” No, what? Most native speakers today definitely say things like “雨大，不去了” in daily conversations. > Take his most famous poem, Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again (再别康桥). In Classical Chinese, a farewell to a river might be compressed into four dense characters: Liu shui, li ren (流水，离人 | Flowing water, departing person). But Xu wrote: > (轻轻的我走了，正如我轻轻的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩) Sorry, it's just stupid. Yes, Xu's poetry style is heavily influenced by European languages. However it doesn't mean this is equivalent to "流水，离人."

raincole 7mo ago
> The constant use of “I” (Wo) is a modern invention; classical poetry usually omits the subject to create a universal feeling. 我(Wo, "I") has been constantly used for a very very long time. Just less in poetry. For example, this is from early 19th century[0]: >> 嫣娘答應著，出來三步兩步，連忙跑到園裡，一進門就高聲說道：「我回來了，我可也回來了！」 This is from Journey to The West, 16th century: >> 我等在此，恐作耍成真，或驚動人王，或有禽王、獸王認此犯頭，說我們操兵造反，興師來相殺，汝等都是竹竿木刀，如何對敵？須得鋒利劍戟方可。如今奈何？ This is allegedly more than 2,000 years(!) old[1]: >> 帝力於我何有哉 Actually, there are pronouns specifically created for western text: - 她 (she) - 妳 (female you, no longer used in mainland China) - 祂 (originally this character was only used for He and Him in the Bible). The author mentioning 我 instead of these makes me question how knowledgeable this article is. [0]: https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E9%A2%A8%E6%9C%88%E9%91%91/04 https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E9%A2%A8%E6%9C%88%E9%91%9... [1]: https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E6%93%8A%E5%A3%A4%E6%AD%8C https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E6%93%8A%E5%A3%A4%E6%AD%8...
- connorboyle 7mo ago
  >> 我等在此... This is also an example of a plural suffix ("-等") which the post author paints as English/Western influence (specifically "-们")
  - raincole 7mo ago
    Even 們 was used in Journey to The West all the time. I really don't know where the author got the idea that plural suffix is something from English. Perhaps this whole article is AI-generated.

AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago

why use many word when few word do trick?

Apocryphon 7mo ago

I wonder how this accounts for regionalisms, let alone different Chinese dialects. Taiwanese Mandarin uses 研究 as a verb easily enough.

underlipton 7mo ago

I'll read this when it's written by a human.

egeozcan 7mo ago

I'm not one of those AI haters, and as long as you give it enough love, I have nothing against the usage of AI in blog posts. Actually, I'm even quite disappointed that I'm not allowed use AI to correct my grammar here anymore. That said, this has so much fill-words and weird section titles that reading becomes torture. Not to mention the lack of sources.

userbinator 7mo ago
There's a whole spectrum between "full AI slop" and "no AI usage". This article is far towards the former.
em-bee 7mo ago
incidentally i just made this argument in another forum: whether a text has substance isn't important to me. what is more important is whether the text reflects the author's thoughts, whether it is original or authentic. an AI-generated text doesn't do that. i want to talk to a real person, not someone enhanced by AI. (let me get this out of the way, that's why i also don't like makeup. apart from special cases or situations, i consider the necessity of makeup to be able to present oneself in public like a mask that hides the real person behind it.) when i engage with a topic, my engagement is with the person behind the text, not the text itself. if someone writes their texts with AI, then i can no longer recognize the real person behind it. i can no longer see which arguments in the text are important to the author, and what are the author's own opinions. the purpose of a dialogue with a person is to get to know that person better and to develop a shared understanding of a topic. that's not possible with an AI-generated text. i can neither get to know the person behind it, nor can i see how their understanding develops. there's a high risk that the person doesn't understand everything the AI says. (this text was originally written in german, then machine translated but manually edited for style (replaced expressions that i would not use myself))

dirteater_ 7mo ago

The biggest shift in the past ~100 years or so was the fact that mass-literacy became a thing. People started writing how they speak. The written language's disconnect from the spoken language had a bunch of different reasons: bridging the gap between mutually-unintelligible regional dialects, political gatekeeping, etc. I think the main claim of "Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage" owes a lot to the fact that they're two "subject verb object" languages with similar formal/written registers.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

yorwba 7mo ago

This article seems to completely ignore the fact that languages change over time on their own and attributes all differences between Literary Chinese and Modern Standard Chinese to contact with European languages, which is rather excessive. Lu Xun was interested in translation, but he was even more interested in writing for the common folk, i.e. not in some relexified foreign language. There are definitely some innovations that were originally used in translations (e.g. different characters for gendered pronouns that are pronounced identically) and of course there are loanwords, but I think most of the claims about grammar are false.

contingencies 7mo ago
Fun fact: Luxun proposed dropping Hanzi entirely. The communist party conveniently forgets to teach that part to the youth because it doesn't fit their nationalist narrative.
- canjobear 7mo ago
  Even more than that: Romanization was the official goal of the Communist party until Stalin talked them out of it! https://faroutliers.com/2004/04/24/how-stalin-and-the-cultural-revolution-preserved-a-chinese-tradition/ https://faroutliers.com/2004/04/24/how-stalin-and-the-cultur...
  - contingencies 7mo ago
    Nice! Didn't know that. I wonder if they Romanized transliterated 'Vissarionovich' as a test case. Regardless, with pinyin they certainly did a better job than the Taiwanese! Pretty chilling evidence for the emergence of post-revolution Mandarin as newspeak, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
    - justaboutanyone 7mo ago
      While pinyin might be "better", there's still a lot of room for something better than it

luyu_wu 7mo ago

This article seems overly critical trying to impose a stance. I have never heard anyone say "因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了". > The Sausage Sentence: English stacks relative clauses. Modern Chinese attempts to shove that complexity into a single pre-noun modifier using de (的), creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory. This is given without any evidence. "Creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory" sounds like something Claude might write. IMO, 的 is far from as negative as the author (or AI) portrays it; arguably better than the multitude of English synonyms (his, her, theirs, its).

canjobear 7mo ago
In any case, Classical Chinese did the same thing but with 之.

canjobear 7mo ago

The article is mistaken on a number of linguistic points. For example 们 was used to mark plurals way before some 19th century translation, if you look at things that were written in the vernacular and not in Classical Chinese.

krackers 7mo ago
It's AI generated, so it's no wonder the facts are a bit off.
- QuesnayJr 7mo ago
  AI tends towards regurgitating conventional wisdom. I suspect if it was written using AI it required some bullying to get it to go alone.

zapzupnz 7mo ago

Where are the sources? These seem like huge assertions to make without citing a single source.

remywang 7mo ago

There's so much wrong with this article. For starters, no one speaks Classical Chinese/Wenyanwen. Not now, not ever. It was designed for writing only, and the conciseness was to preserve bamboo (but stayed because it conveyed a sense of authority). Most importantly, modern Chinese remains challenging after all of the "westernization" events used as examples in the article, and the difficulty is not just because you get a new set of characters. On top of the writing system, you need to learn the tones, new phonemes like x, zh, q, and an entirely new vocabulary that shares very little cognates with English. And the grammar is different, with Chinese relying on much less conduction and requires much more context to understand.

try-working 7mo ago

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” I would say "下雨了，我不去“ or something like that. The second example is perhaps what a language learner would say in order to "speak correctly", but nobody actually speaks or writes like that.

thenthenthen 7mo ago
Totally. I also feel such a disconnect with HSK material, no one speaks like that or even uses that vocabulary. But I guess thats the case with almost every language/language course.

nxobject 7mo ago

Luckily, we can omit needless words... but AI hasn't integrated Strunk and White into SOUL.md yet.