If English was written like Chinese (1999)

Post by g9yuayon » Sun, Jun 09, 2024, 2:05 AM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #148

hnfong wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common claim. But... I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation. Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do " much. I've read an attem…

I can feel a sort of a double translation shims hiding in that example. Chinese "改进" would work as a verb on its own but dictionary wise it will tend to mentally map to noun form "improvement" than the verb form "[to]improve", and that necessitates a "do" verb, which plausibly results in bloated forms such as "进行改进"(forward going [with] improving forward). Common claims are often common for reasons...

Well in this case Chinese is like Spanish and Japanese, a verb can also be used as a gerund.

Post by samus » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 10:43 AM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #310

samus wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The origins of Standarddeutsch trace back to Martin Luther's bible translation that exposed a huge audience to a very important text, which was most importantly also written to be approachable to that audience. The German dialect it used was a colonial dialect that already contained mixed features from multiple dialect area and was thus suitable for a wide audience. Of course the emerging standard underwent developme…

> The origins of Standarddeutsch trace back to Martin Luther's bible translation that exposed a huge audience to a very important text, which was most importantly also written to be approachable to that audience. If you want to go this route, then you could also say that the origins of Standard Chinese date back hundreds of years, to the language spoken by the imperial bureaucracy, or to massively popular works writt…

Those vernacular versions of written Chinese always existed, but they had very little prestige compared to the Classical Chinese (文言文) mainly used by the imperial bureaucracy, which was based on literature from the Han dynasty and earlier. Elegant and concise, but it required dedicated education, which was tested in the imperial examinations, and starkly differed from the vernacular versions in both grammar and vocabulary. Modern Written Chinese was standardised only after the fall of the Qing dynasty by the successive governments. Quite younger again than Bühnendeutsch, and so recent that spoken Mandarin has not yet managed to supplant the other languages of China. German has only managed to do so in the big cities, where people at times often don't speak nor understand the dialects of the surrounding rural areas anymore.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)