Languages
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese is a language, though no longer a spoken language. Like any other language, past and present, it has a grammar: a way of organizing words into statements. As in many languages, the basic sentence building blocks are things recognizable as nouns and verbs. The order of elements in the usual Chinese sentence is Subject-Verb-Object, or SVO. All this is so much like English that some English-speaking persons have been lured into the notion that Chinese has no grammar at all. That is not correct. It is apparently true that the first lectures on Chinese grammar, as such, were delivered by George Kennedy during a Fulbright year in Peking. But that just means that traditional Chinese scholarship has been slow to operate with categories of understanding which arose earlier in the European tradition. There is a parallel: Chinese poets operated for about a thousand years before they realized that the Chinese language has tones, and this they only discovered after they had been exposed to the cantillation of Indian hymns, during China's period of direct Buddhist influence (the high Six Dynasties).
It has greatly hampered China;'s understanding of itself that, for much of its history, it has had no other high civilization to compare itself with. We cannot understand one thing; there must be at least some basis of comparison.
A great bar to the understanding of classical Chinese is the Chinese character writing system. For example, the usual student mnemonic for an "peace" is that the character for that word is written with an element usually signifying "roof" on top, and an element usually signifying "woman" on the bottom. "A woman under a roof [your basic domestic scene] equals peace," or so it is helpful to say, when first learning how to write the character. That happens not to be etymologically correct, but it is a handy mnemonic for the beginning student. The large point is that for understanding the Chinese language, the characters are simply a distraction. If Chinese were an unwritten language, the picturesque details of the writing system would not exist, but the way the language makes words into sentences would still be there. Make up any mnemonics you like, just don't start believing them. And don't believe anybody else's, either. We recommend this precaution for practical life: Whenever you hear an argument about China which has no basis but a statement about a Chinese character, that argument is unsupported, and almost certainly wrong.
So much for that. Now here are some possibly useful guides and, yes, mnemonics:
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7 Sept 2018 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
