Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st...
by mac01021 on Thursday January 10, 2019 @05:27AM
(#18872824)
That's a very nice poem (thanks!), but not a good example, mostly because it is a poem.
As a poem, it has no equivalent rendering in colloquial Chinese. Also as a poem, it deliberate sheds information, permitting (or even pursuing?) ambiguity in its quest for specific phonics, scansion, symbolism (in many cases - maybe not in this one), etc.
Probably the way to get an example is to start from something spoken in modern Chinese and see how it comes out different in written Chinese?
Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st...
by PavlikPaja on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @05:42PM
(#18869761)
Classical Chinese is not modern written Chinese.
Re:Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school st...
by FabHK on Wednesday January 09, 2019 @05:45PM
(#18869780)
True. My point is that written Chinese register tends to occupy a space between Classical Chinese and modern spoken Chinese.
Wikipedia says [3]:
"Classical Chinese is distinguished from written vernacular Chinese in its style, which appears extremely concise and compact to modern Chinese speakers, and to some extent in the use of different lexical items (vocabulary). An essay in Classical Chinese, for example, might use half as many Chinese characters as in vernacular Chinese to relate the same content." "Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Northern Chinese varieties including Mandarin, in which two-syllable, three-syllable, and four-syllable words are extremely common." "However, even with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, Classical Chinese can be difficult to understand by native speakers of modern Chinese, because of its heavy use of literary references and allusions as well as its extremely abbreviated style."
However, I don't have a neat example at hand... Anyone?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought
[2] http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_...