Hacker News Reader

Comment by dudefeliciano | Hacker News Reader

"The above is the most accurate translation of the ancient classic available anywhere at any price."

I have read a few different translations in different languages, and the interpretations are often quite different. So I think this description is a bit too overconfident.

I have to think back to a pet project that I never realized in which I wanted to build a platform for people to provide their own interpretation/commentary on this Classic - something like a genius.com for Daoism and the Daodejing. This was specifically because I had noticed so many different translations and interpretations.

Nevertheless I appreciate the website, and anything to do with Daoism, and will be reading this translation as well.

View on HN

A crowdsourced interpretation platform for spiritual texts is actually a really cool idea. It seems like people have already 'abused' genius.com for that purpose:

Bhagavad Gita: https://genius.com/artists/Bhagavad-gita

King James Bible: https://genius.com/artists/Holy-bible-kjv

Tao Te Ching: https://genius.com/albums/Laozi/Tao-te-ching

Seems like something a Wikimedia project could do well

For those who want to compare a translation alongside the original (with pop-up boxes explaining the meanings of the original Chinese) look no further than Yellowbridge:

https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing.php

This website has helped me appreciate the imagery and structure of Mandarin, having never studied it before. I also appreciate the difficulty of translating such a poetic, ambiguous text as the Tao Te Ching or the related I Ching. Helps me understand how to "triangulate" the original meaning using multiple translations of the same source material.

The Tao Te Ching is not written in Mandarin but in Old Chinese. The two are as different, and stand in roughly the same relationship, as Latin and French. These differences include all levels of the language: phonology, syntax, lexicon, and what morphology the Sinitic languages have. In commentaries, the characters of Old Chinese words are sonetimes glossed with their modern Mandarin sound values, but this is ahistorical and often misleading.

The Chinese classics are not accessible to ordinary Chinese without special training. That is why the early 20th century campaign to write in the spoken language instead of fossilized literary languages, made such a huge impact on literacy in China.

Mandarin was just as inaccessible to speakers of other Sinitic languages without special training, but they do not appear to have been left behind in the literacy push, suggesting to me that it was pushing for mass literacy in the first place that did it (effectively providing the necessary special training), rather than the specific choice of language to push.

From the Middle Chinese stage on, the Sinitic languages have more in common with each other than any of them does with Old Chinese, inasmuch as they have all lost the Old Chinese inflections, with all the consequences for syntax that that entails.

AFAIK, Old Chinese is not generally considered to have been an inflected language. Maybe you're thinking about derivational affixes like nominalizing -s, that were not indicated in writing (giving two different pronunciations for the same character) and subsequently disappeared due to sound changes (but still leaving different pronunciations behind, which is how the existence of the affix was reconstructed).

I do agree that all modern Sinitic languages have changed greatly compared to the Old Chinese period, but that doesn't mean they have more in common as a result; on the contrary, different changes in different regions made all of them more dissimilar from each other.

There are some commonalities that spread through contact between neighboring varieties, but there are also commonalities resulting from the continued study of classic texts.

Thanks for clarifying, shows my naivete even here.

That sounds really interesting. Can I contact you regarding this somehow?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com