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Comment by primroot | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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".

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

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