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Just 'English with Hanzi'

86 points by scour

by raincole

2 subcomments

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”.
> Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。”
No, what? Most native speakers today definitely say things like “雨大，不去了” in daily conversations.
> Take his most famous poem, Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again (再别康桥). In Classical Chinese, a farewell to a river might be compressed into four dense characters: Liu shui, li ren (流水，离人 | Flowing water, departing person). But Xu wrote:
> (轻轻的我走了，正如我轻轻的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩)
Sorry, it's just stupid. Yes, Xu's poetry style is heavily influenced by European languages. However it doesn't mean this is equivalent to "流水，离人."

by yorwba

2 subcomments

This article seems to completely ignore the fact that languages change over time on their own and attributes all differences between Literary Chinese and Modern Standard Chinese to contact with European languages, which is rather excessive. Lu Xun was interested in translation, but he was even more interested in writing for the common folk, i.e. not in some relexified foreign language. There are definitely some innovations that were originally used in translations (e.g. different characters for gendered pronouns that are pronounced identically) and of course there are loanwords, but I think most of the claims about grammar are false.

by egeozcan

2 subcomments

I'm not one of those AI haters, and as long as you give it enough love, I have nothing against the usage of AI in blog posts. Actually, I'm even quite disappointed that I'm not allowed use AI to correct my grammar here anymore.
That said, this has so much fill-words and weird section titles that reading becomes torture. Not to mention the lack of sources.

by dirteater_

0 subcomment

The biggest shift in the past ~100 years or so was the fact that mass-literacy became a thing. People started writing how they speak.
The written language's disconnect from the spoken language had a bunch of different reasons: bridging the gap between mutually-unintelligible regional dialects, political gatekeeping, etc.
I think the main claim of "Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage" owes a lot to the fact that they're two "subject verb object" languages with similar formal/written registers.

by BigTTYGothGF

2 subcomments

How do we know this isn't just a difference in register? Classical Chinese was extremely literary, but did people actually speak that way?

by idreyn

0 subcomment

> He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu)
I can't help but think of this classic essay about Java OOP: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

by cwnyth

2 subcomments

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”.
> Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。”
Two observations. One, I see this in Thai, too, which might yet preserve that earlier syntax. ไม่เผ็ด ไม่กิน ("No spicy, no eat") is perfectly fine in Thai, though it is possible (and very unidiomatic) to create a formal conditional using เพราะ ("because").
Two, it's also true that ancient languages in general have a different logic to their syntax than their modern descendants. I've always felt it was easier to read and understand academic French than ancient Latin, despite having much less training in the former than the latter. There is probably a shift that happens, that isn't always deliberate, when speakers of a language encounter a radically different world than one they were born into. And add contact to that: the author write of creolization, though it's not only about vocabulary and syntax. That's the just the visible. It's often about changing how we perceive things. To return to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types.

by luyu_wu

1 subcomments

This article seems overly critical trying to impose a stance. I have never heard anyone say "因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了".
> The Sausage Sentence: English stacks relative clauses. Modern Chinese attempts to shove that complexity into a single pre-noun modifier using de (的), creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory.
This is given without any evidence. "Creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory" sounds like something Claude might write. IMO, 的 is far from as negative as the author (or AI) portrays it; arguably better than the multitude of English synonyms (his, her, theirs, its).

by canjobear

1 subcomments

The article is mistaken on a number of linguistic points. For example 们 was used to mark plurals way before some 19th century translation, if you look at things that were written in the vernacular and not in Classical Chinese.

by try-working

1 subcomments

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。”
I would say "下雨了，我不去“ or something like that. The second example is perhaps what a language learner would say in order to "speak correctly", but nobody actually speaks or writes like that.

by woolion

0 subcomment

There is a similar path with Chinese painting. The language of painting was refined over millennia, but the last 2 centuries caused an extremely rapid integration of Western influences. This article is interesting because language is like water to a fish, the invisible medium humans live through. Since art is more 'foreign' and 'superfluous', the change were more obvious and there was much more debate regarding this evolution than in linguistics.
I discussed with a painter in the artistic lineage of Shi Guoliang, and he told me he remembered how much that could be seen as "Western art painted with a Chinese brush". I think the criticism was more directed towards such painters than say the Lingnan school that explicitly sought to revitalize Chinese painting through foreign influences, because it's really in the foundations of the painting -- how perspective and light are tackled through the 'scientific' system rather than the elaborate symbolic system of classical painting.

by picture

2 subcomments

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”.
> Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。”
Interestingly the "traditional grammar" is much more conversational and natural, while the latter is expected for modern written work.

by ggm

2 subcomments

An article for those who read both because none of the grammatical exemplars are really explained. You have to take his word for it without transliteration or explanation.

by nxobject

0 subcomment

Luckily, we can omit needless words... but AI hasn't integrated Strunk and White into SOUL.md yet.

by underlipton

0 subcomment

I'll read this when it's written by a human.

by AreShoesFeet000

0 subcomment

why use many word when few word do trick?

by zapzupnz

0 subcomment

Where are the sources? These seem like huge assertions to make without citing a single source.

0 subcomment

by Apocryphon

0 subcomment

I wonder how this accounts for regionalisms, let alone different Chinese dialects. Taiwanese Mandarin uses 研究 as a verb easily enough.

by remywang

0 subcomment

There's so much wrong with this article. For starters, no one speaks Classical Chinese/Wenyanwen. Not now, not ever. It was designed for writing only, and the conciseness was to preserve bamboo (but stayed because it conveyed a sense of authority). Most importantly, modern Chinese remains challenging after all of the "westernization" events used as examples in the article, and the difficulty is not just because you get a new set of characters. On top of the writing system, you need to learn the tones, new phonemes like x, zh, q, and an entirely new vocabulary that shares very little cognates with English. And the grammar is different, with Chinese relying on much less conduction and requires much more context to understand.