<http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html>Link
--Posted By johl to <http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/01/why-chinese-is-so-damn-hard.htm>monochrom at 1/30/2009 11:51:00 AM
If you plan to learn Chinese, you may be interested in this
enlightening and delightful piece by David Moser, University of
Michigan Center for Chinese Studies:
Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese
is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't
tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if
you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is
because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of
esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly
code for dissemination among a small, elite group of
intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature
backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more
be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if
transported to the present, could understand the entries in the
"personal" section of the classified ads that say things like:
"Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg.,
some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752
lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."
