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
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
Only for the fun of it (actually recreation), your sentence (phrase), slightly modified, in English and its possible translation in current Italian:
> English represents a strange Romantic-Germanic hybrid (Germanic by linguistic classification but with a tremendous/predominant vocabulary of Romantic origin). A more appropriate comparison would be with respect to a French/Italian/Spanish bibliophile.
L'Inglese rappresenta uno strano ibrido Romantico-Germanico (Germanico come classificazione linguistica ma con un vocabolario tremendamente predominante di origine Romantica). Una più appropriata comparazione sarebbe rispetto ad un bibliofilo Francese/Italiano/Spagnolo.
I have noticed that (in my experience) when you use in English the Latin-originated synonyms of more commonly used English (possibly Germanic originated) words you are perceived as having a higher level of education (and also as being a tad bit snob).
The Romance influence in English comes from the elites after the Norman conquest, which is why Latin-rooted forms are seen as more upper class (and, often, pretensious).
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....
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.
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.
> 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.
If you read some non-contemporary early modern English literature, you may find Latin, classical Greek, or French discussed or used without translation in the expectation that the reader will be able to understand it directly.
But this is evidence that the reader is expected to have undergone significant training, not that English speakers can understand ancient Greek without training.
> And anecdotally I don't think I've ever met a Chinese high school graduate who didn't have some proficiency with Classical Chinese.
We can be even more definite here: this is because Chinese high school graduates have all received training in Classical Chinese.
You can successively "classical"ize a Chinese work that you can't do with English or French vis-a-vis Latin. I can take a sentence and iteratively make it more and more classical. Here's the sentence "His name is John," successively made more classical. Every version except the last can be found in all sorts of modern Chinese written works. Conversely every version except the first is valid Classical Chinese.
Even within Classical Chinese you can be more or less "Classical."
他的名字叫约翰。
其名为约翰。
其名约翰。
其名约翰也。
Moving away from examples in the language itself, high-level programs of advanced modern Mandarin comprehension, both for foreign speakers and native speakers test for some knowledge of Classical Chinese.
Every modern Chinese language for foreign speakers learning program I know of dedicates at least one (if not multiple) module at the advanced level to Classical Chinese (this is separate from a dedicated Classical Chinese course that goes in more detail) with Classical Chinese readings.
For ILR level 5 modern Mandarin fluency the U.S. State Department explicitly lists knowledge of Classical Chinese (to the level of a native speaker) as a prerequisite (and in fact Classical Chinese shows up on a sample test I cannot find at the moment).
It is also a component of the HSK level 6, which suggestively calls it “能读懂略带文言色彩的文章“, that is "can read articles with a slight amount of Classical Chinese flavor" hinting again at a register-like relationship.
And of course Chinese comprehension tests for native speakers in China and Taiwan have a Classical Chinese component.
I would be very surprised to find any similar standard for Latin and English or Latin and French. What ESL program teaches Latin?
Note this isn't just cultural pride from China. These are foreign institutions that have deemed a certain amount of Classical Chinese necessary to understand the modern Mandarin corpus (more so than just set phrases such as sine qua non in English, but true grammar and independent vocabulary).
Sure everyone receives training in Classical Chinese, but that's because it's a symbiotic relationship. Because everyone knows Classical Chinese it influences the modern language. Because it influences the modern language it becomes a prerequisite for Chinese language programs (even those for foreign speakers).
> And of course Chinese comprehension tests for native speakers in China and Taiwan have a Classical Chinese component.
> I would be very surprised to find any similar standard for Latin and English or Latin and French. What ESL program teaches Latin?
> Note this isn't just cultural pride from China. These are foreign institutions that have deemed a certain amount of Classical Chinese necessary to understand the modern Mandarin corpus (more so than just set phrases such as sine qua non in English, but true grammar and independent vocabulary).
It is just cultural pride from China, but cultural pride with many ramifications.
Literacy standards including Latin for high registers of English don't exist now. But they used to. And standards of Latin for high registers of French are of course even more historically normal -- there was a long period where Latin was the highest register of French (exclusively in writing).
You're making the point that Chinese people receive extensive training in Classical Chinese and are therefore familiar with it to differing degrees. But you know what they're not familiar with to differing degrees? Their modern language, which they all know natively. The fact that they can read some Classical Chinese after being trained in it just isn't evidence that they could read it before being trained in it.
I'm saying Classical Chinese and modern Chinese are to an extent inseparable and that this is reflected in every Chinese teaching program domestic or foreign.
Can you show me a sentence that is both Latin and English or both Latin and French? There are plenty of such examples for Classical Chinese and modern Chinese.
At times there's a blurry line between Classical Chinese and modern Chinese. It's a false dichotomy to say that you can train in advanced modern Chinese without training in some Classical Chinese.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of things in Classical Chinese you'll be exposed to because they're still widely used in modern Mandarin.
Its most common pronouns (especially first and third person): 我、其、之 etc.
Its connectives: 为、于、乃、因、与etc.
Its lack of 是 as "to be" and instead leaving "to be" implicit between verbs and nouns: take e.g. the PRC's constitution. Many paragraphs use 是 as "to be" zero times. Few use it more than once or twice.
On a similar note its demonstratives: 此、彼、兹、indeed even 是 again.
And when it comes to standard vocabulary, most of the time a classical meaning of a character remains productive in modern Chinese.
There's certain Classical Chinese works I'd be comfortable using to assess a foreign speaker's modern Mandarin comprehension. For example if a speaker cannot read the 2nd century poem 凤求凰 (especially the first part), they almost certainly cannot read a modern newspaper article. It reads almost exactly like how a modern angsty teenager might try to write a modern Mandarin love poem.
Just about the only category of things you won't see in modern Chinese from classical Chinese are its interjective particles (兮、也、矣、etc) which have no semantic meaning.
What makes Classical Chinese difficult to read for a modern Chinese reader is its extreme concision and its grammatical flexibility. Its vocabulary is only a secondary concern. I would say if you know modern Mandarin, you know probably around 70% to 80% (depending on the text) of the words you'll see in a classical Chinese text, especially for texts after the Warring States period. You're definitely not going to totally understand the text and it's going to be feel laborious picking over each paragraph, but you will understand the gist of what's going on, just based on your modern Mandarin knowledge.
"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
> 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/ Then consider how different the last common ancestor of both languages must have been.
> 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
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.
fair enough. i was told that by a old/english scholar and i checked wiki sample text to confirm, but i must have been mistaken.
>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.
i think it depends on the specific text in question, but i'm drawing blanks because im not very informed on old lit in general. again tang poems are taught at an early age, but perhaps most text would be harder to read
This is more fair. As yorwba points out elsewhere, though, some pretty large differences between Old Chinese and modern Chinese are masked by the fact that Classical Chinese is always presented with modern spelling[1]. (Other, larger differences are fully apparent.) To be more closely analogous, you'd render "þæt wæs god cyning" as "That was good king" -- and suddenly the gap from "that was good king" to "that was _a_ good king" doesn't look so large.
[1] There are good reasons for this; since Chinese writing bears very little phonetic information, we have only limited knowledge of what Old Chinese sounded like in the first place.
Ok but that is three words, what about the rest? Leaning three words is somewhat far removed from leaning a language. (Btw: I can’t grok your final statement in the parenthesis — it doesn’t make sense in English, what were you trying to say?)
It made sense to me as well but I can see how I got there and how I shamed the meaning of the sentence without thinking
> I learned English words like while, for and next from qbasic, for real (it had good help in your local language)
I replaced the word your with the word my in my head without conscious effort. I don't know if it is correct but it is kind of what I expected as I skimmed through the sentence.
There was an article or something saying when we read we can read fast because we don't read every word but rather try to auto complete as we go.
also note that Soro's position isn't to inform a position on which Facebook should proceed with community guidelines, but instead he just wants to replace the heads of the company for whatever reasons. very helpful!
it might be more accurate to say (as a hypothesis), is that whatever this "inner monologue" thing is, people don't seem to experience it the same, even if it does exist/not-exist
it is consistent for someone to procrastinate and work on something for a long time: you work for a long time while putting little effort. perhaps this was the intended interpretation?
I think the problem is that "Meena" says she's writing a paper, but then immediately asks the human "what's your paper about?". The human is not writing any paper as far as we know.
The issue is Meena is first saying it is working on a paper then asks the human what the paper is on; the human never mentioned he was working on any paper, Meena herself did, hence the inconsistency.
>very small children spending a lot of their time learning basic concepts of cause and effect, properties of objects, materials and physics and so on.
i do not believe that young children explicitly/consciously simulate in their minds to learn cause and effect and other things, though this might be up for debate
as to whether it is conscious or not influences whether you would want to model it a-la 3d physics engine, or if not then perhaps there is a more elegant solution we do not know of yet
Not many four year olds could answer those questions. I think the hostility is people reacting as if they were asked to jump through those verbal hoops in a conversation.
