tea & chinese characters

Sure; thanks for the suggestion!

I'm drinking the young, supposedly organic 101Tea bingcha made from wild and ancient Jing Mai trees, and enjoying its fruity, brown-sugar sweetness.

/Lew

This is fascinating stuff. But - and please don't take this as a protest - from the standpoint of someone who's never systematically studied the language, it seems like a tremendous amount to learn in order to understand a character. It makes me wonder how many readers of, say, Chinese newspapers have this level of literacy.

/Lew

That's the problem, right? It takes years of concerted effort even for native speakers, even using simplified characters.

BTW I'm drinking tieguanyin, as always ... kind of in a rut, but I love it.

And wouldn't simplified characters make the etymological understanding in Samarkand's post harder to attain? Simplified characters are easier to write, but they often hide the full compound nature of traditional characters.

/Lew

I think in many cases they make that sort of deep understanding (how a character came to have its meaning) much more difficult, if not impossible. There's a good discussion of this in Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China - which is a superb book all around - and in some one of John DeFrancis's books. DeFrancis is kind of a nut job, though. He's in favor of completely replacing characters with pinyin.

Let's put that in perspective. Do you understand the etymology of every word in English? Does anyone? No. Unless you look it up in some dictionary about the subject. The same is for Chinese. While, Chinese might get a general sense of the meaning by looking at the character, we don't really worry about that. All we care about is how to correctly write it, and what it means. So we don't have to know the etymology of a character to know the meaning. As long as you already know what it means. Know what I mean?

And one thing is interesting. People in Mainland China can generally read Traditional Chinese, but not write it. But for people who read Traditional Chinese, very hard to understand Simplified Chinese - just can't recognize a lot of those characters, unless you spend some time learning them.

Then, classical Chinese is much different from modern Chinese; much like old English is different from modern English. So a lot of things written in old times are too hard to read by most ordinary Chinese. For example, 敬其事而后其食, this sentence is pretty simple, but many people still can't understand it.

"niisonge" Let's put that in perspective. Do you understand the etymology of every word in English? Does anyone? No. Unless you look it up in some dictionary about the subject. The same is for Chinese. While, Chinese might get a general sense of the meaning by looking at the character, we don't really worry about that. All we care about is how to correctly write it, and what it means. So we don't have to know the etymology of a character to know the meaning. As long as you already know what it means. Know what I mean?

"Danny" Agreed. During school days, we looked at the radical and guessed at the meaning of the word from a passage during lessons because we were too lazy to lok it up in the dictionary. Etymology is a "fun" science to me, looking at the character and learning how the system of writing in Chinese developed and evolved, while a radical provides a hint to the character, this is not always true. The writing system has evolved so much over time that there are characters which have radicals that do not provide a clue at all.

"niisonge" And one thing is interesting. People in Mainland China can generally read Traditional Chinese, but not write it. But for people who read Traditional Chinese, very hard to understand Simplified Chinese - just can't recognize a lot of those characters, unless you spend some time learning them.

"Danny" People in Mainland China can generally read Traditional Chinese, but this is increasingly on decline. I spoke to some educationists from China recently, and they lamented that many children in Mainland China nowadays are not exposed to traditional characters as they were in the past, and many of them no longer understand these characters.

"niisonge" Then, classical Chinese is much different from modern Chinese; much like old English is different from modern English. So a lot of things written in old times are too hard to read by most ordinary Chinese. For example, ???????, this sentence is pretty simple, but many people still can't understand it.

"Danny" Smart.

Is BabelFish close?

"After respects its matter but its food"

Jim

niisonge wrote: ...

"After respects its matter but its food"

Jim

"Danny"

Nnnnope. :")

Well, educated English speakers know a lot of etymology, but point taken. However there are two points worth making: one, Chinese characters are harder to learn than words, so etymology, or more accurately the system of associations between characters, is potentially more helpful; and two, Chinese etymology largely refers back to characters that are still in use and that Chinese readers already know, as in the previous example. English etymology draws on languages that most of us do not speak - Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Latin, Greek, Old French.

I learned traditional characters first, and when I moved to China I was ridiculed for not knowing 头 and 书.

Respect his business, and then his food? Maybe, and then his eating? Classical 食 is a verb, right?

I prefer to think of Classical Chinese (as opposed to traditional a/k/a complex characters) as a separate language that occupies a position roughly analogous to Latin and Greek for us. Well-educated Taiwanese can easily read Classical Chinese, but that's because they study it for years and years in their incredibly rigorous high schools, much like Brits who went to Eton can read Greek. Intelligent mainlanders can understand bits of it, much like I (American) can guess the rough meaning of Latin based on the two years of it that I halfassedly studied in high school.

Are you asking if it's close to English?

/Lew

niisonge quotes Confucius: 敬其事而后其食

敬 (jing) derives from the term 敬止 (jing zhi), meaning to carry out one's duty to his best ability, from the book of 大学 (da xue) :

为人臣, 止于敬 As a subordinate, to carry out one's duty to the best of his ability

食 (shi) is food = living = living expenses = salary

Hence the quote means : first one must complete a job to the best of his ability before he can discuss how he should be paid

ps. Using Google groups to access, not sure how the chinese characters will turn out. If you can't read it, send me a private mail and I'll forward this to you.

Danny

"niisonge" Then, classical Chinese is much different from modern Chinese; much like old English is different from modern English. So a lot of things written in old times are too hard to read by most ordinary Chinese. For example, 敬其事而后其食, this sentence is pretty simple, but

many people still can't understand it.

"Danny" The characters and their meanings are not that ancient. One might think they are, but if one think of the phrase 敬业 (jing ye) meaning to focus and work hard on one's career; and 粮食 (liang shi) which not only means food, but crops farmers harvested for money, hence "Salary", it is not difficult to reconstruct the phrase in English.

Analects is still largely comprehensible - now reading The Book of Poetry and I-Ching, that's seriously like reading Beowulf in Old English!

ps. Yipee! It works! I can type in chinese characters now!

For friends interested in older Chinese, I recommend this strongly:

Danny ps...let's talk about tea baby, let's talk about brews and sips, Let's talk about all the good pots, and the bad pots that may be, let's talk about tea, huh yeh, let's talk about tea...

I guess that means no more email ;-). Funny you could do it on your Blog,Email but not with your Newsreader. Junk those Newsreaders and jump on Google.

Jim

Danny wrote:

That is an excellent website. Too bad it doesn't have the Cha Jing.

samarkand4458cce3$ snipped-for-privacy@news.starhub.net.sg5/3/06 11: snipped-for-privacy@uk2.net

Danny,

It has been said that in Brooklyn, my home town, the ability to act crazy will stand a person in good stead during those tense moments of seemngly unavoidable and unwelcome street encounters.

Ya gonna fit right in, boy!

Michael

"Lew" And wouldn't simplified characters make the etymological understanding in Samarkand's post harder to attain? Simplified characters are easier to write, but they often hide the full compound nature of traditional characters.

"Danny" I thought what you said, and put the question to my lecturer. We were taught that the "The Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters" was implemented in 1956, but very little was said about the etymology of these reformed characters.

It is a common misconception - as you have mentioned - that the characters are easy to write but do not convey the full nature of traditional characters. In reality, many of the simplified characters were in existence hundreds and thousands of years ago, and some were even the primitive forms, which the traditional character system expanded upon. The 1956 Scheme mainly standardized some of these written forms.

Take a common character that we are familiar with, the character for "Cloud" in "Yunnan" - 云 (yun)

The primitive form of this character was etched on rocks and bones as 2 horizontal strokes to indicate the sky, and a pigtail below to indicate the shape of a cloud. It is not difficult to see from 云 how closely it resembles the primitive form.

This is in fact the written form in many of the chinese ancient texts up to fairly recent times, when the form 雲 took over, indicating cloud that carries the rain. This was done in part also to separate 云 from another meaning "to speak". Ironically, the 雲 which we take as traditional form is actually the newcomer.

The 1956 Scheme returned the old form of 云.

So in learning, I do tend to think that simplified characters is an extended part of the etymology of traditional characters.

Yo mann, me going back ta doin' ma Salt n' Pepper rendition...

Danny

snipped-for-privacy@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com5/4/06

Danny, not only is your explanation fascinating, but very well presented. I enjoy reading your answers to' these questions, and learn a tremendous amount from them. Thanks.

Michael