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> 2. Chinese does not feature conjugation or much punctuation, and often leaves out verbs completely. [...] English (or most Indo-European languages) rarely drop the verb, and if the translator puts it there, they have to choose a specific conjugated form (ie person, number, tense, voice, mood...), thus necessarily interpreting.

While Chinese has its unique set of quirks, having a wide range of possible translations is just as much about the target language. Translating English into a language with gendered nouns, case markers, pronouns of varying formality, and/or a more liberal word order, also requires the translator to choose which possible nuance was intended by the original. For example, "I'm sure you're very busy." can apparently be expressed by any of 95 different Italian sentences: https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/2046775 Not all of those distinctions are necessarily relevant, but in the end a sentence in any language is a fuzzy bundle of possible meanings, with no particular reason to expect that bundle to align perfectly with any other language.

Since Indo-European-Languages share to varying degree some root bundles, there are idioms that have analogues in all those languages, and subsets of basic grammar that are nearly identical.

Of course there is a particular reason to expect perfect alignment between languages, hypothetically, which is so far hopeless, namely universal grammar.

I'm sure that example sentence has 95 variants in English alone. "You're tied up, I know".

You do realize that "Lower"/低 Is a verb right? In fact if you look at the complete poem every line contains a verb except the first one.

The full poem is: 床前明月光

Bright明 Moon月light光 before前 (the) bed床.

疑是地下霜

(The) suspicion疑 is是 frost霜 on下 (the) ground地.

Verb: 是/Is

举头望明月

Raise举 head头, gaze望 (the) bright明 moon月.

Verb: 举/Raise

低头思故乡

Lower低 head头, think思 (of) (the) homeland故乡.

Verb: 低/Lower

Quoted words are those not present in the poem. Chinese, like most languages doesn't have a definite article so "the" is implicit. The last "of" isn't present because "homeland"/故乡 is the object of the word think in Chinese where as the topic of a thought is usually marked with a preposition in English. The above was a word for word translation where only the order of words were changed. If you haven't noticed already, the last two lines literally translate to English in the same order (save for the lack of pronouns).

The only thing missing are pronouns, which also occurs in English with the passive voice. 静夜思 By the way literally doesn't deviate in any way from "vernacular" Chinese in terms of grammar or vocabulary. In fact it's taught in early grade school and is easily understood.

> the written language often cannot be understood when read aloud unless the listeners are already familiar with the passage and what this means in turn is that the written language should probably not be seen as a transcription of speech

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. I learned the poem you mentioned before I knew how to read or write and understood it fine. On the flip side, I didn't know what the pledge of allegiance meant until I learned how to read/write. Differences between formal and casual registers exist in every language, there is no indication that this is any different in Chinese. Your example of "abbreviating words" also makes zero sense when the "parts of words" you refer to are atomic and have meaning by themselves. DeFrancis makes his wild claims about Chinese because he believed that all writing was ultimately phonetic when it's clear that all writing is logographic, which is the case for both Chinese and English.

I'm tired of the mysticism that people display towards Chinese when arguably it has few difference from English.

> I'm sorry but this is nonsense.

> I'm tired of the mysticism that people display

Would you please make your substantive points without indignant swipes? They degrade discussion, it's not hard to do without them, and your comments will be better for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are basically saying that your understanding as a kid of a classical poetry was well developed. You understood the surface analysis, but I very much doubt that you had grasped any symbolism past the literal bright disk in the sky.

You are potentially biased by native speaker instinct. What you understand just fine is only what you think it means. This is called identification. This does not give you authority over the interpretation. To everyone else the phrases look almost like gibberish, to the point that a lot deeper meaning is expected than the surface is letting on. They (read: I) do not really identify with, but reject it.

You very apparently did not read the post very clearly that you cite.

You responded to "the written language often cannot be understood when read aloud". However you did not finish reading before anger blinded your sight. It goes on "cannot be understood when read aloud unless the listeners are already familiar with the passage". It would be easy enough to criticize that this is a paradox situation. However it goes on further, "what this means in turn is that the written language should probably not be seen as a transcription of speech", which implies to me that the deeper sense is encoded in the signs themselves. I'd add that poetry thrives in word play. In general, the older the poem, the obscurer the word play, and yet most innocious the surface form for it to survive. Although, it might be that the verse is really just esthetically pleasing on a phonetical level, I wouldn't know (and GP would have mislead me). That is, a lot of old poetry starts verbally and is written down only generations later

Word play on the graphemic level is a dimension well known in English from signage. But the combination with sound adds a constraint that's hard to imagine. "Speaking signs" (The city of Hamburg having a Burg "castle" on their emblem) are often banal, but can escalate over many levels of connotation (one level: The castle's gates are depicted open or shut depending on the times; Many levels: The background is red, the castle is white? A tavern may play on it and add a pork, because "ham"). I believe that's what they were trying to say.

I expect that is something you must be aware of subliminally because there is no way to learn chinese signs well without a theory of composition. If you really only learn the geometric forms, I'd be disappointed.

望 for example has the sign for moon up-right, and emperor down-low, if I recal correctly. The latter also means tenno in Japanese and has some relation to sky (or the forbidden city in Peking) and high up, though up would be one stroke less (cp "[up]on", "raise"'s lower half, and its mirror image in "ground"'s left and "lower"'s right; I gather "is" may be "wall, stand, up; set in place); Also cp "head" ("top"?). The phonetics are often shown by only one of the radicals or none at all, so the symbolism can be easy to miss in speech, although the connotation may be obvious from common context, precisely such as this poem, if the semantics remained stable. In fact the poem might be an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing. I am aware that's not quite what was being talked about. Not to mention that the symbolism of "is" has not been convincingly by scholars. It is elsewhere rather translated as "that", by the way, which is not withstanding insofar is that or that is are fixed collocations, that might well fuse to one word "that's", too. Word is that winter's coming. In times of stability at the end of the year as the evening star rises I like to think it's time to crawl before the lord, ask for allowance, and bring home my yen to support my family and spend time with them over the year's end.

Indeed, English is no different. Just why is beowulf ostensibly "bee wolf = bear"?

Also, the second to last part where you say English is logographic confuses me.

This is the mysticism I'm talking about. You're literally arguing that the meaning behind the poem comes from the shape of the characters themselves. You have the common sentiment amongst westerners that Chinese writing isn't actually writing but are merely "signs" as you put it. It is true that most writing systems (the latin script included) originated as pictographs, but just as nobody compares the letter "A" to an Ox in the analysis of English poetry, no serious analysis of Chinese poetry involves looking at the shape of the characters themselves. You do realize that the shape of the characters themselves change drastically over time right? Go to the "字源字形" section of 望's dictionary entry here for an example:[0]

> which implies to me that the deeper sense is encoded in the signs themselves.

That is not at all what GP is implying, GP cites John DeFrancis, who is the opinion that the Chinese script is actually a (imperfect) phonetic script because he believes all scripts are phonetic. The bulk of GP's argument is also about the grammar of the Chinese language, which was what I was arguing against in my comment.

[0] https://zdic.net/hans/%E6%9C%9B

Sadly, images on that site don't load for me, but the advertisement does.

> You are potentially biased by native speaker instinct. What you understand just fine is only what you think it means.

You could apply that argument to my interpretation of anything in any language. All this time I thought F=ma was about physics when it's really a drawing of a Samurai.

The interpretation that you substitute mine with is not only conceited, but relies on false assumptions drawn from an imperfect understanding of a completely different language.

> 望 for example has the sign for moon up-right, and emperor down-low, if I recal correctly. The latter also means tenno in Japanese and has some relation to sky (or the forbidden city in Peking)

The radical 王 you refer to does not mean emperor, but king by itself. The phrase commonly translated as "emperor" is in fact 皇帝, which is a combination of the titles of 皇 and 帝 similar to the title of "Rex Imperator" in Europe. The japanese phrase Tennō does not mean "emperor", it means sky (or celestial) emperor. It is the combination of 天(Ten, meaning sky) and 皇(Nō, one of the afforementioned titles that is commonly translated as emperor). Neither the word or character for emperor has any relation to the sky by themselves and no reasonable person would think of the word emperor from seeing the word from gaze because they share a radical.

> In fact the poem might be an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing.

Given that the poem was written centuries before any language other than Chinese used the Chinese script, your analysis doesn't make sense. It seems to me that you just want to shoehorn your very limited understanding of Japanese into this discussion.

> Neither the word or character for emperor has any relation to the sky by themselves

The wiktionary entry does mention such a hypothesis. My reasoning is rather inspired by parallel evidence in I do-European deus "god, sky father", dies "day", etc; and a similar parallel in Egyptian with Afro-Asiatic roots that I do not quite remember right now.

> and no reasonable person would think of the word emperor from seeing the word from gaze because they share a radical.

That's why I thought it needed to be pointed out.

By the way, I ment a rosetta stone linking speach to writing given an oral side channel; If it rhymes or makes a neat mnemonic then the side channel would be error tolerant; if not, I guess, tradition is either not error tolerant, or the speach becomes corrupted. The signs change, too, surely, but paper is patient.

I am shoehorning alright. Lyrical tradition is one of the corner stone of our culture. I can only hear you saying it's just words, and in effect, I'm not even opposed to that notion.

Actually I'd argue that a theory of composition of Chinese is somewhat overrated. It really only makes sense for the common list of Chinese radicals. It may be useful as a device for remembering characters, but the explanations each person comes up with are bound to be idiosyncratic.

For example, you seem to be implying a connection between the meanings of 王 (king) and 上 (up) based on their graphical similarity. This is purely an artifact of regular script, one of several different scripts for Chinese. This similarity goes away entirely in older scripts and cursive scripts.

In general graphical analysis of modern Chinese script is usually extremely misleading and to do accurately often requires an extraordinarily convoluted process. I would not recommend it as a way of formally analyzing Chinese. Through the repeated process of phonetic borrowing (taking a character similar in sound to an unrelated word and using it to represent that word as well); changes in Chinese script over the millennia; variant characters that have been consolidated, split up, and re-consolidated; variant meanings that have been consolidated into a single character, split up into separate characters, and re-consolidated; erroneous interpretations of character structure between different iterations of Chinese scripts; and normal semantic drift of words over time, it is often maddening to divine the meaning of Chinese characters from their graphical forms that is any more specific than the usual context offered by a Chinese radical.

This also means that ancient Chinese doesn't have too many graphical puns. There are isolated examples e.g. where these puns are only used to get around prohibitions on certain characters (e.g. characters used in an emperor's name could not be written for the duration of that emperor's rule, so graphical puns would occasionally be employed). This persists in modern Chinese where to get around some censorship, graphical puns are employed.

Likewise, I am very skeptical of viewing the poem as an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing. Just writing it in a different script changes a lot of the graphical structure! There are no commentators I know of, Chinese or otherwise, that even attempt to analyze the graphical structure of the characters in the poem.

Graphical analyses really only have value for the earliest stages of Chinese writing (oracle bone script and to some degree bronze script). And even then things are painful, especially because the idea that a word is identifiable with its character starts to fall apart. You start having to think harder about whether a single character is meant to stand-in for several words or whether multiple characters all can be used for a single word.

The idiosyncracy is what allows it to poetic, in the fantastic sense. The degree to which it is precise is what matters here, though. Since I don't speak a word of Chinese, so I'm drawn to the characters. This obviously leads pretty much nowhere, of course, but it is an interesting exercise.

> This similarity goes away entirely in older scripts and cursive scripts.

your post seems to be entirely negative onwards from that paragraph, although the development of the two characters is pretty straight forward. I didn't find a cursive soho style variant (perhaps because I don't remember the correct name of the style?) but it's notwithstanding, as far as I can tell, it's rather late.

> 1. Chinese has very few distinct syllables compared to other languages, even including tones. Thus, many words in speech are multisyllabic to allow for disambiguation.

This is true of Mandarin, but Classical Chinese had mostly monosyllabic words with many more distinct syllables and maybe wasn't even a tonal language. The exact pronunciations are obviously unknown except by reconstruction from descendant languages, but it's unlikely that ambiguity of pronunciation was much of a problem when the texts were written. It does however affect works of later periods written in Literary Chinese, trying to emulate the style of the classics they were quoting.

Very good point. I notice that many varieties (eg Cantonese) seem to make many distinctions that have collapsed in Mandarin.

So, whether Classical Chinese read out was intelligible to ancient listeners is hard to establish, but there’s a good chance it was.

Surely, Classical Chinese is a language quite different from contemporary vernacular Chinese.

Of course, Latin is quite different from Spanish, too.

Yet, I’d maintain that Classical Latin is more easily rendered in modern English (and with less interpretative leeway) than Classical Chinese.