Thousand Character Classic

Supposedly the QianZiJing was also widely memorised. The SanZiJing is a MUCH later text (probably half a millenium, give or take). That said, the SanZiJing is a much more pedagogical and all-round meaningful text. More value can be derived memorising it, as it is essentially a pre-Syllabus for a classical education, not only laying out basic principles, a set of texts for the student to learn, but also featuring an array of keywords that a curious student with access to a good teacher or extensive library can follow up on, all contained in an easy to memorise summary. QianZiJing by comparison is a fun and interesting literary curiosity.

The thousand character classic was also used to teach the reading of chinese characters in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, though perhaps to a lesser extent than the three character classic. I have no idea to what extent this is true today, but it certainly held up until the 19th century.

Yes, 千字文 is not common in mainland China at all. I was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory of the content of 千字文 other than the title.

三字经 on the contrary, is ubiquitous. I am guessing everyone heard of the first 2 terms of 三字经: 人之初 性本善, meaning "the human nature is good"

This can be seen as a foundational psychology imprint of relatively dossile personality on every Chinese.

Nowadays, I always get a vibe of Dune when reading Chinese ancient classics. What a monumental accumulation of human cultivation in those classics!

Despite communism transformation, China actually get back to its traditional way of thinking and dealing with the outsiders around the world.

Or a different interpretation: the conventional mandate of heaven returned, but with a communism decoration.

I think it might be possible to do a literal translation into English that also eschews function words – since it's poetry, you can use a freely associating style.

E.g. the first rhyming couplet 天地玄黃 宇宙洪荒 was translated somewhat verbosely by Nathan Sturman as "The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless" but why many words when few do trick? "Dark sky, yellow earth; vast space, barren time."

To make it rhyme, you could replace "earth" by "lime" (referring to calcium oxide, not the fruit) but that would be very barren indeed.

> It's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of", "is".

How about:

> Gadsby is a [260-page] 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright which includes only four words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

Yes, most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds.[0] However, this makes most sense in the original Old Chinese[1] phonology, where the forms were taking place.

For example,

偒 was pronounced /*l̥ʰaːŋʔ/ and 陽 was pronounced /*laŋ/, but the modern pronunciations are tǎng (/tʰɑŋ²¹⁴/) and yáng (/jɑŋ³⁵/) respectively. So the phonetic part 昜 /*laŋ/ no longer consistently represents that sound, although in this case the final -aŋ is still present.

And as for sounds that were present in Old Chinese but not in Middle Chinese and Mandarin, like [2] 巽 was pronounced /*sqʰuːns/, now xùn (/ɕyn⁵¹/), they underwent a series of regular sound shifts that make them sound quite different when used in characters in Mandarin.

Also, Old Chinese was not a tonal language, tones first appeared in Middle Chinese, which the modern system derives from (with changes). Tones never had a chance to appear in writing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%BD

That's one style of character composition, by far the most common, but not the only one.

> I suspect that the common usage of it avoids words that sound the same and cause confusion

This problem is solved in modern Chinese by making most words more than one syllable long.

English also has homophones. It's challenging, but also fun. There's some tradeoff between "language complication (unnecessary complexity) impairs thinking" and "language puzzles inspire thinking".

The essay I'm referring to was originally published in the Shenbao from the 24th of August to the 10th of September under the name "Huayu" in the rubric Ziyou Tan ("Free Speech"? More or less) which was then regrouped by Lu Xun in Qiejie ting zawen (see Quanji, VI, p. 86).

Regarding the Shuowen, you are absolutely right, I was thinking of the Kangxi dictionary.

Hope this clarifies it.

The argument that a collection of 4-character phrases in this particular manual and in the many other that follow using the same name, particularly after 1911, is enough to "criticize the emperor" misses the point.

It is not an idiosyncratic interpretation either, but it is one of a contemporary, Peng Ziyun (see Dazhongyu yu dazhong wenhuade shuizhun wenti, Shehui Bao, 1934, VII, 3)

As far as I'm aware, Lu Xun shared this opinion.

While there is a first TCC, the one from this page, the name was used and reused for new manuals, intellectuals sometimes argued that 1000 characters was all that the masses could possibly comprehend/need.

At the end of the Qing dinasty, in particular, when some intellectual and political leaders were preoccupied by bringing "writing to the masses", intellectuals and great (war|) lords participated in the movements but with the sole intention of being understood by the masses without giving them the ability to express themselves. For a range, it's 1897-1911/1912.

Not true. You know uppercase, lowercase, and cursive, as well as iconography used commonly in the west for various road signs, currencies, and governments. You know flags and warning labels.

Kanji is just a superset of that.

ChatGPT's got it.

Yo, listen up, as I paint the universe broad and deep, Sky's dark, Earth's yellow, secrets ancient they keep. This life, this hair, rooted in the core, Four elements, five virtues, what we livin' for.

Cities shining, from east to west we're ruling, Grounded in the earth, it's agriculture we're schooling. Lose yourself in books or market's charm, Life's treasures, keep close, safe from harm.

Sun and moon, their dance of light and dark, Nature's cycle, in harmony, leaves its mark. Respect for life, ain't no damage done, From mountains high to rivers deep, under the same sun.

etc.

It doesn't help that many of these characters are not in frequent use anymore, which means that the translation model has been trained with way less sentences involving them. Others' usage pattern have shifted, or they picked up many additional meanings over the millenia, and the translation model is probably not savvy enough to ignore all the modern ones. With "modern" meaning everything after like 200 A.D.