Re: tea & chinese characters


niisonge wrote:
Let's put that in perspective. Do you understand the etymology of every
word in English? Does anyone?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

.

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