It's a difficult situation to translate into Western terms in modern times But it's like all these old-timey historical figures referred to only by their Latin names, names they'd never have used in conversation
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Notable also is how medieval church records would often Latin-ised everyone's names to Henricus or whatever but their daily use name is likely a dialectal diminutive of it
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True. And the hegemony that came from first the Roman Empire and later the Catholic church meant that Latin was the prestige language in Europe, so that was political, too
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My understanding of how classical written Chinese is used historically is very coloured by me being a medievalist, I confess. I often end up likening it to the relationship the various European cultures had to Latin.
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There's a lot of similarities, yeah Including how "classical Chinese" as we know it is a "high language" that for much of its history was used by scholars to communicate in writing, that they translated their actual daily vernacular into
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jeannette_ng and
So a lot of the stuff that makes a book like the Dao De Jing so gnomic is just the result of it being highly compressed into shorthand by scribes etc
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It is also sometimes very not gnomic because those characters being still in use can have very blunt and mundane meanings. Like, some old texts can seem so immediate you forget that character used to mean another thing. That there has been linguistic change.
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Replying to @jeannette_ng @arthur_affect and
Have we brought up how the use of Chinese characters to transliterate loanwords can result in added meaning? It blew my mind utterly to learn that the origin of 台灣 wasn't that it looked like a platform. It's a transliteration of an older native name.
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Replying to @jeannette_ng @arthur_affect and
And that obfuscation can make it look like chinese is very "pure", that we don't have loanwords, because they get so thoroughly assimilated and the characters ascribe new meaning that create the mirage of a plausible etymology within the language
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Yes, exactly It's often called out when English people tried to turn foreign words into English words that had a vaguely appropriate meaning, as a high-handed and arrogant thing to do But of course false etymology happens whenever anyone grabs loanwords
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It's compelling when it's done with some thought Like the thought Burgess put into Nadsat, turning Russian words into this dark futuristic slang ("horrorshow" for "khorosho", "lewdies" for "lyudi")
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