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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

To me it seems overwrought. We have Chinese philosophers who are experts in Classical Chinese philosophy who study these things and labor over them. And we have expert Chinese-English experts as well as philosophers versed in both modern languages.

So I can’t immediately see how it’s more difficult than looking into Classical Greek philosophy.

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There's an additional barrier when it comes to classical Chinese: Written Chinese underwent a vernacular revolution in the early to mid 20th century to make it comprehensible to more people but until then written Chinese is nothing like what spoken Chinese is like (my guess is that because written Chinese started with ideogram rather than phonetics). You can still see some examples of this when you encounter something formal in Chinese like wedding invitations. Despite being fluent in more than one dialect of Chinese and having some reading fluency, formal Chinese is incomprehensible to me.

Or take for example: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch1

Even if you can't read Chinese, note the regularity of sentence/phrase lengths between commas, etc. People don't talk like that. And this is a work of fiction, not philosophy. It's meant to be consumed as a popular work by the educated.

Or Art of War:

https://ctext.org/art-of-war/laying-plans

Although being a military manual, it wasn't really meant to be easily read.

Historically, written Chinese was the realm of the well educated Chinese, not meant for the masses.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not a great example. The particular section you've linked to is a Classical Chinese poem quoted in the introduction to the novel. The rest of the book is (for the most part) written in Ming Dynasty vernacular Chinese (although it sometimes veers into a quite formal vernacular) and is actually kind of close-ish to formal modern Mandarin.

The 20th century vernacular revolution didn't mean that written Chinese was exclusively Classical Chinese previously. All the famous novels of China (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, etc) are all written in the vernacular of their time. It is nonetheless true that the overwhelming majority of writing that was not literature was written in Classical Chinese.

As a side note, I would also rate Art of War as fairly readable (for a modern reader) Classical Chinese. Its excerpts are usually assigned at a middle school level in China. So "wasn't really meant to be easily read" feels a bit like a stretch. It is far easier to read (at least for me) than something like the Analects or the Daodejing.

Classical Chinese still influences Chinese written works today. In order to fully understand modern Chinese literature, newspapers, legal documents, essentially anything at a register more formal than everyday Chinese, bits and pieces of Classical Chinese will filter through, to the point that I'd argue most readers of modern Chinese will gain a rudimentary understanding of Classical Chinese from reading the modern Chinese corpus.

Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both have complex detailed grammars that leave little room for ambiguity. The language of the Dao De Jing has a minimalistic grammar, where more has to be inferred from context.

That’s a great point you raise. Thanks for pointing that out.

You are welcome. Here is some material describing the grammar in case anyone is interested. http://www.invisiblebooks.com/CGCC.htm

People love to blame the grammar, but you won't find anyone mentioning being made out of wood, hitting balls or any sports in a philosophical discussion on the question of "What is it like to be a bat?", which is understood to belong in the realm of animal consciousness. That's despite there not being any grammatical distinction between the two kinds of bats, they're only implicitly disambiguated by the context.

In my experience, context dependence only becomes noticeable when you don't understand, so foreign languages always appear to require more contextual knowledge than one's mother tongue. If you actually try to use a formal grammar to generate all possible parses for a sentence, you'll notice your brain filters out a lot of nonsensical but grammatically valid interpretations.

Chinese classical texts don't work that way as you suggested.

In what way? I admit that I haven't read a lot of Classical Chinese and usually need a Mandarin translation to help me understand, but that's easily explained by it being a different language. The experience isn't much different from reading modern Cantonese for me.

Chinese went through a vernacular revolution in the early to mid 20th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese

Written Chinese today is a lot easier to understand than classical Chinese.

Sure, as I said, Classical Chinese is a different language. That it's hard to understand for speakers of modern Sinitic languages is not surprising. On the contrary, it's remarkable that people can have some success at reading texts in a language whose pronunciation they don't have the faintest idea of.

It seems that without knowing Chinese, most Westerners can only resort to appeals to authority to make their points.

I'm curious who you think doesn't know Chinese in this discussion. I already mentioned I do, hangonhn said they do, and leemailll's username makes me guess that they're not an exception either.

Given that they seem baffled by wedding invitations, they don't seem like they're very proficient. There's a ocean of difference between "Where is the bathroom" and "We hold these truths to be self-evident".

> If you actually try to use a formal grammar to generate all possible parses for a sentence, you'll notice your brain filters out a lot of nonsensical but grammatically valid interpretations.

Indeed. Canonical example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...

The stress of the words is different depending on PoS, unless you don't even try, there's little room for ambiguity. In writing, correcting the spelling error to fruit-flies solves the problem. The issue is real, but the example is naiv.

Just speculating here. But it could be easier to find a closer Greek translation than a Chinese one. After all, a lot of the words we use in English have Greek or Latin roots.

So I can see how it'd be more difficult to get the author's meaning across in this case. There aren't always accurate translations of a concept, which convey all the meaning correctly. And at least with German or other languages, it's not unheard of to actually use the word in the original language and give it a definition, rather than translate it. Which seems harder to do with Chinese than with Greek/German/Latin.

-- EDIT: Fix some typos

I'd go even further in the speculation. Have you seen how some Greeks today get upset at the thought the language of Homer did not sound like theirs? I think there is a similar phenomenon with many Chinese (I'm hoping the phenomenon is less general among scholars), where they think their ancient philosopher were all Confucianists. The ambiguity of the grammar does not help. Words can also be ambiguous sometimes, but that is less of a problem. There are ancient dictionaries. But have then a Chinese amateur interpreter tell you that door means family or that ghost means ancestor with disregard to both the context and the dictionaries, completely distorting the meaning of the text in favor of some bland conformist platitude, and you will soon start rethinking the meaning of Cultural Appropriation.

> where they think their ancient philosopher were all Confucianists

That's a very big accusation to make without anything to back it up.

It happens occasionally with Chinese using a romanization. Sometimes the dao in Daoism just gets directly written as the dao. Sometimes the li (rites, customs, proper behavior, etc.) in Confucianism just gets directly written as li.

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