Re:To Abolish the Chinese Language: On a Century of Reformis...
by barry-cotter on Sunday September 17, 2017 @01:55AM
(#15268419)
>>* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.
>What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.
The person you're responding to is contrasting Classical Chinese with Mandarin. Recall that it wasn't until the Republic of China that Classical Chinese was abandoned as the written standard and that it is quite a bit more divergent from Mandarin than Latin is from Italian. The spoken language changed plenty but any educated person could read pretty much the entirety of the Chinese canon because the only writing in the vernacular was what was perceived as popular dross for peasants and women. Much as almost all scholarship in Europe up to the 1700s was written in Latin, anything for an educated audience in China was written in Classicak Chinese.
Mandarin(普通话) is a lot more divergent from Classical Chinese than Cantonese is, not that any modern Sinitic language is particularly close.
Total agreement on the boring and stupid assumption of superiority of lots of writers from languages with alphabets. The massive and unnecessary complexity doesn't do any harm to anyone except foreigners trying to learn a language who can't speak it already. Removing it would be uprooting a people from it's culture, like Vietnamese.
>What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.
The person you're responding to is contrasting Classical Chinese with Mandarin. Recall that it wasn't until the Republic of China that Classical Chinese was abandoned as the written standard and that it is quite a bit more divergent from Mandarin than Latin is from Italian. The spoken language changed plenty but any educated person could read pretty much the entirety of the Chinese canon because the only writing in the vernacular was what was perceived as popular dross for peasants and women. Much as almost all scholarship in Europe up to the 1700s was written in Latin, anything for an educated audience in China was written in Classicak Chinese.
Mandarin(普通话) is a lot more divergent from Classical Chinese than Cantonese is, not that any modern Sinitic language is particularly close.
Total agreement on the boring and stupid assumption of superiority of lots of writers from languages with alphabets. The massive and unnecessary complexity doesn't do any harm to anyone except foreigners trying to learn a language who can't speak it already. Removing it would be uprooting a people from it's culture, like Vietnamese.