As a French native, I have a minor nitpick on the comparison between Diderot / Voltaire and Confucius / Mencius. Diderot and Voltaire wrote Modern French, whic

As a French native, I have a minor nitpick on the comparison between Diderot / Voltaire and Confucius / Mencius. Diderot and Voltaire wrote Modern French, which is incredibly similar to the French that is spoken nowadays. I doubt a 4th-year French student would breeze as easily through, say, Rabelais' Gargantua, a 16th century text written in ancien français, before the modernization of French. It's so difficult to read even for natives (I've done the experience myself) that there are usually bilingual "Old French" — Modern French editions available for students. And that's not even speaking about earlier medieval French which wasn't a single language, but a collection of langues d'oïl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/%C3%89dition_Juste,_1535 http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/%C3%89dition_Juste,_... The study of classical texts in general is difficult in any language when we're talking about timespans of centuries or even millenia.