suddenly occurs to me, is the obsession with threes purely an indo-european thing? I can't think of anything remotely similar in chinese culture
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Really cool, never thought about it comparatively. I think it's a literary aesthetic & poetic device; it feels satisfying, like anaphoras.
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@bokane may know something about this -
Number/noun combos go back pretty far (五行/五色/六德 etc. in Warring States texts, e.g.); Budd. terminology, which came later, also does this...
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Will try to think of references for early instances of this - Perry Link's "Anatomy of Chinese" talks about 20th century usages a bit, IIRC.
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Couldn't immediately find anything dedicated to this just now, but will ask my adviser; it's the sort of thing he'd know about.
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I'd guess that scholarship on early translations of Buddhist texts would probably be a good place to look, since those focus on language...
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...or maybe Harbsmeier on language/logic in Early China.
@david__moser might also have some thoughts on this...
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For a culture that views ‘4’ as cursed, that’s a lot of lists of 4.
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In Years of Rice and Salt KSR has a character say the Chinese love enumeration because they have so much more stuff than anyone else
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It's like 5000 years ago they learned to count and never let it go.
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