I was merely questioning the claim that modern Chinese cannot read ancient Chinese. I made no claim whatsoever on Italian as I have no knowledge on that matter.
However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before.
The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
Sinologist Victor Mair reports:
"
On Thursday we had our Spring mid-term examination. I always test the students on a seen portion and an unseen passage. Because we go over the text in class together so very carefully, they usually do well on the seen passage, but often the unseen passage — for which I try to pick a text that is at about the same level of difficulty as the stage we're at in class at the time — completely throws the students for a loop. This time it happened that the students (2 from China, 2 with a Japanese background, 2 from the United States, 1 from Hong Kong, 1 from Vietnam, and 1 from Ghana) were stymied by the unseen passage that I gave them. They could understand all of the characters singly, and I even gave them additional vocabulary notes and explanations. But they just couldn't make sense of the passage as a whole nor even of its constituent sentences. Among the 9 students, only 2 could roughly figure out what was happening in the unseen passage. Of course, this is terribly frustrating for the students, but it is also good practice to push them to their limits to see what they can do unaided (like letting a child try to ride a bike without training wheels after a period of using them). In cases like what happened on Thursday, I tell the students that I will be lenient, so I'll add on 20 or 30 points to their grade because I fully realize how hard the test is. If they can get any part of it, I'm proud of them."
These students are college aged people in US. They are not what I call "educated Chinese people".
The way the classic Chinese was written has always been different from everyday vernacular Chinese. This has been true for every generation of Chinese learners since ancient times.
How people spoke Chinese have changed over the years dramatically. I don't think the ancient ways of speaking Chinese is understandable by modern Chinese. However, the way the language is written in formal setting has changed little up to the end of Qing dynasty in 1912.
An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. During the exam, some enterprising students could even write their essays entirely in classic Chinese, garnering wide circulations on the internet.
It's not clear from Mair's post if he's teaching undergraduates, graduate students, or both, and Penn's course catalog isn't much help as it looks to have been cross-listed at a variety of levels: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/pc/term/2016A including CHIN492/EALC222/EALC622
Regardless, please note that of the 9 students, 2 were from China and a third was from Hong Kong.
> An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it.
There's a serious conflict here with your simultaneous claim that college graduates aren't yet "educated".
What's the conflict? College graduates from where? A college graduate who has gone through the entire Chinese education system would be required to learn reading comprehension of classic Chinese.
Granted, there are always students for one reason or another claimed that they have leaned nothing from school. It's either a false claim, or if that's true, calling them educated would be a stretch, isn't it?
Did you even read your cited stackoverflow answer?
The first answer said exactly the same thing as I said: the understanding of classic Chinese is part of the modern Chinese education, and is enforced by the state administrated college entrance exam, which is arguably the most important thing in determining a pupil's life prospect.
Victor Mair does not indicate if the two who did ok were the ones from China and the rest not from or educated in China. Which would be kind of telling.
A couple of things might be going on in your comment:
- You might be confusing the ability to pronounce a sentence with the ability to understand the meaning of a sentence. As here, in "Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings." This confuses "traditional Chinese", the spelling system from before 1950, with Middle Chinese, the language Wang Anshi wrote in. It is much like saying that the Romans didn't have difficulty reading Greek because their alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. It happens that Wang Anshi wrote using traditional character forms; that is unrelated to his language. For another example, the opening couplet from Jabberwocky is in faux English:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe
This has no meaning, but no modern English speaker should have difficulty reading it aloud.
- You might be suffering from a cognitive illusion.
- You might feel compelled to defend this viewpoint out of some misplaced ethnic pride.
Regardless, I can safely say that your viewpoint here is so much 费话, and your "firsthand knowledge" is either a lie or stunningly nonrepresentative. Though the topic has come up many times, no Chinese person of my acquaintance (and they tend to come from 复旦大学) has ever claimed that the Chinese of today can understand Old Chinese without extensive training in the field, much more than the educational system provides by default. They all admit, without feeling any shame, that Old Chinese is totally unintelligible to them and everyone else. You might even be the first Chinese person I've seen making this claim from the safety of the internet -- the claim is common, but generally it comes from whites who are blindly repeating what they heard somewhere.
I think you and your chinese friends might be miscommunicating or misunderstanding what you are talking about. Part of the problem might be that the western conception of what a language is, is wildly different from something like chinese.
The situation is not really helped by western linguists trying to force shape chinese to fit their own notions and many chinese people just following along with whatever the west came up with due to the prevalence of western cultural standards.
Of course reading classic Chinese requires extensive training, that's what their middle and high school educations are for. I don't know who you talked to, but if they are in college, they have passed that part of the training. They might be shamed to admit to a foreigner how much of their lives have been wasted in studying these useless things every semester. But that does not change the fact that they are trained to read classic text, because that's what the state mandates.
What you do not seem to understand, is that the classic written Chinese had always been different from vernacular Chinese. This was true even for ancient times, because the classic written Chinese is NOT a record of spoken language, but a literary form, whose mastering is a prerequisite towards ascending into the aristocracy class in China.
My mother was a Chinese literature major in college (in China), and I've asked her point-blank whether she could read and write in 文言文 (literary Classical Chinese), and she said only with a language reference and great difficulty.
My grandmother could read and write it fluently, but that's because in her day a good amount of correspondence was still written in Classical Chinese.
> Of course reading classic Chinese requires extensive training, that's what their middle and high school educations are for
I highly doubt your claim that your average Chinese HS graduate can read or write ancient or Classical Chinese, given that there's not much incentive to acquire that skill. I doubt even 5% of Chinese college graduates can do it.
We still teach Latin in the US, but hardly anyone graduates high school with the actual ability to read and write in Latin. I spent 6 years between middle and high school learning French, but I certainly wasn't proficient enough to even read a newspaper, even though I studied hard and got good grades in it.
I just asked my wife, who was in China until high school, and she says she doesn't know a single person who can read Classical Chinese, despite having many college-educated friends in China.
The incentive for Chinese high school students to read classic Chinese is very clear: it's part of the all important college entrance examination.
Writing classic Chinese is a completely different matter. It is considered an impressive feat, which some high school students exploit to achieve publicity for themselves and to get full score in the exam. Examples are just a google search away: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E6%96%87%...
If your wife had undergone the same pressure to pass the all important college entrance exam, like I had many years ago, she would have learned to read classic Chinese, like I have.
My wife had already read 资治通鉴 when she was in high school. She is a special case though because she scored the first in her province's college entrance exam. I was far worse than her as I was not even among the first five in my high school, but now I read classic Chinese for pleasure, just like many other educated Chinese men would do when they get older.
> She is a special case though because she scored the first in her province's college entrance exam
> I was not even among the first five in my high school
By your own admission, both you and your wife are exceptional. If your HS class had 150 people in it, you're still in the top 5%. You are by definition part of an academic elite. You both have the motivation, time, and skill to appreciate classical Chinese literature, but you're improperly generalizing to the general population.
What about the other ~100k+ people who took the provincial exam that year, who scored much worse on that section? Or do you just tautologically consider them all uneducated people, because they failed to acquire a working knowledge of classical literature?
There are plenty of topics on the college entrance exam that people temporarily acquire some level of proficiency in to pass, but how many people actually retain it once they're working? For example, calculus is (generally) required for college applicants, but I'm willing to bet that 80%+ of college graduates are not able to do basic integrals and derivatives on the spot without access to reference materials.
Hence the general skepticism about your claim that educated Chinese people can read classical Chinese to any reasonable level of proficiency, if we define 'educated' as 'has a degree'.
I have specifically said "educated Chinese", which would not be the general population.
The ability to read classic Chinese is not comparable with doing Calculus. The former is a language, the latter is math.
In particular, the basic vocabulary of classic Chinese is more or less the same as vernacular Chinese. The differences are the syntax and usage, which once acquired, would not be forgotten.
> "educated Chinese", which would not be the general population.
I think most people in this thread assumed 'educated' just means high school and college-educated, which is why everyone is disagreeing with you so vehemently. Since most people have at least a high school education, that's clearly not sufficient to be 'educated'.
It seems your definition of 'educated Chinese' is basically tautological and prescriptive -- a Chinese person can't be considered truly educated until they have gained the ability to read the classics. I would hazard that only a tiny fraction of secondary school graduates each year would be truly 'educated', under your definition.
While that's a view that is consistent with thousands of years of Confucian tradition, it might be helpful to state your assumptions and definitions up front next time.
A high school graduate would not be considered "educated" in a Chinese context. Since I am talking about "educated Chinese", whatever western idea of "educated" does not really apply.
For example, someone has just gone through the motion of schools and learned nothing, he may even be functionally illiterate (as 19% high school graduates in the US do, http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults...) by your assumed Western definition, that person is "educated". However, any Chinese would disagree with that.
So it's just a matter of opinion. Mine just has more commonsense: "If you really learned what schools taught you, you can call yourself educated, otherwise, you are not."
Instead of asking in the abstract which is easy to misunderstand, how about trying something concrete. Give them a piece of text and ask them if they really do not know what it says. And analyze their response further than just the surface level, of why they responded the way they did.
However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before.
The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.