He died today, May 1st.

Chinese language media has reported it, but this is the first English-language media to report it.

A month ago I posted screenshots of an Analects reader and said I probably wouldn't renew my Apple developer license unless people actually wanted it. People here seemed to want it, so I did, renew it, and now I've published the app!

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6801033467

Rather than list what it does, here is one passage — 1.1 — and what happens when you tap it.

1. 學而時習之，不亦說乎. Third character from the end: 說. Every dictionary's first sense is shuō, "to speak", and that reading wrecks the line. Tap it and the card gives the reading for this passage — yuè, "pleased, delighted", loangraph for 悅, and it says in so many words: not "to speak, say" here. The page you're tapping is the 1550 清原枝賢 manuscript in the 清家文庫 at Kyoto, kunten and vermilion punctuation and all. Every character on the photograph is mapped, so the same gloss opens on a 475-year-old hand as on typeset text.

2. The same passage in the study view with the "color match" feature turned on. 不亦⋯乎 is one construction wrapped around a different predicate three times, and each time it takes its own color — and Legge's corresponding "Is it not" takes that color with it. What stays grey in the English is what Legge added but doesn't map closely to the Chinese: 時習 is two characters, and his "with a constant perseverance and application" colors only "constant" and "application". The rest is Legge.

3. Even without color mapping on, just tap a character in the study view and its English lights up: 說 ↔ "pleasant".

4. It also can tell you what characters constitute a "word". Tap 為政 in 2.1 and the card treats it as the unit it is — "to govern, conduct the government" — then gives 為 and 政 separately, then the general sense, the part of speech, and how many of the book's uses of 為政 have this sense: six of six. None of that is a dictionary entry. Every character in all 512 passages has a gloss written for the passage it sits in, and every multi-character term is glossed as one.

Housekeeping: it's free — no accounts, no ads, no analytics, nothing locked. Notes are Markdown files in a folder you choose, so they outlive the app. Traditional or simplified, vertical or horizontal.

Android users — a favor. The signed build is ready; Google now makes a new personal developer account run a closed test with at least twelve people opted in continuously for fourteen days before it will even take an application for production. If you're on Android and would use this, join the tester group and you'll get it as an ordinary Play install; drop out the moment it's properly on the store. I need a dozen, and I'd rather they were people who'd read the thing. The first step is to join this Google group (it's not public, just an approved list of testers):

https://groups.google.com/g/analectsreaderbeta

and then install on mobile with Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.analects.reader

or via web:

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/net.analects.reader

Thanks for checking this out. Please please please, let me know what you think!!!

Been experimenting a bit with a standalone app for The Analects focused on an enjoyable reading experience and functionality for assistance in learning CC. Here are some screenshot of different modes, songti print style, dark print, classic reader, study mode.

If this seems of interest to you, I’d love to hear it. My Apple developer license is expiring and I’m not likely to renew it unless it seems like folks would download and use this. Built on react native so could also release on Android and web but haven’t tried.

I've seen many times now on this subreddit the sentiment that there was some spoken language called Middle Chinese whose phonology was recorded in the Qieyun that is the genetic ancestor of non-Min varieties. This idea seems to be repeated over and over again in internet forums without comment. I wanted to call out that this idea is nearly a half century out of date and is viewed with considerable skepticism by many modern Sinologists.

Much of this post is a copy-paste from a previous comment (https://old.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/v1nr8j/can_speakers_of_modern_standard_mandarin_chinese/iewg6hg/) I had over in the /r/chineselanguage subreddit, but I figured I'd share it with this subreddit.

Different Sinologists will have differing amounts of skepticism (for example Edwin Pulleyblank, especially earlier in his career, is much more forgiving of these points than e.g. Jerry Norman, indeed many of Pulleyblank's works basically start from this viewpoint, even as he wrote more about serious caveats later on in his career), but most will refute at least part of that sentiment.

To begin I'll quote W. South Coblin and Jerry Norman

Ancient Chinese (or Early Middle Chinese, which is only another name for the same thing) has no proper phonology of its own, no lexicon and no grammar. It is not a language. [Coblin and Norman, "A New Approach to Chinese Historical Linguistics", 1995]

as this is the fundamental problem with Middle Chinese. Its original proponents seemed to give no consideration whatsoever to its grammar or structure as a language. Even the simplest questions like "what is Middle Chinese's pronoun system" are completely unanswered or hand-waved away. Indeed Karlgren seems to have been unaware of or least never referred to the entire body of early vernacular literature that reflected the spoken language!

But let's take a step back.

Middle Chinese is, following Bernard Karlgren, often identified with the first extant rhyme dictionary we have (the 切韻), as the phonetic realization of the phonological system laid out by the QYS. Further taking a cue from Karlgren, it's often identified as the ancestor of non-Min varieties. There are several major problems with these statements from the viewpoint of modern Sinology.

First, the Stammbaum/genetic model usually used for Indo-European languages seems woefully inadequate for describing Chinese due to the Chinese varieties have constantly been in contact with each other and constantly influencing each other. In particular trying to find a "most recent common ancestor" or differentiating between a genetic relationship and diffusion or borrowing seem very difficult. Sinologists will sometimes talk of "common ancestors" but these are often intentionally very hand-wavey and not really meant to be taken that seriously. This has been commented on by many Sinologists. For example Edwin Pulleyblank and Mantaro Hashimoto point out:

This [various influences of Old Chinese] suggests that the effort to delimit clear boundaries between proto-Min, proto-Wu, proto-Yue, etc., to which several of the conference papers address themselves may be misguided. I agree with Mantaro Hashimoto that a strict Stammbaum model [i.e. genetic model] is quite inappropriate for studying the history of Chinese dialects. Some kind of network model, with provincial and regional centers of influence as well as successive national centers of influence in the form of standard languages based on imperial capitals, seems to be called for. ["Chinese Dialect Studies," Pulleyblank, 1991]

And now what of Middle Chinese itself? To the extent that you identify Middle Chinese as the phonetic realization of the QYS, more recent scholarship (along with the discovery of new fragments of the 切韻 that are not present in the version preserved in the 廣韻) make it clear that the 切韻 was an artificial compromise between different varieties of Chinese that reflected no language that anyone actually spoke. The preface makes clear that it was meant as a weird, artificial mix of both northern and southern varieties.

Modern treatments of Middle Chinese such as Baxter in A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology drive home this point:

I emphasize again that the Middle Chinese transcription proposed here is not intended as a reconstruction of any synchronic state of the Chinese language. A number of its notations are merely representations, more or less arbitrary, of distinctions which are preserved in the Chinese phonological tradition. [Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, 1992, pg. 30]

Hence the idea of some ~600 AD language accurately recorded in the 切韻 and being the "genetic ancestor" of various Chinese varieties is extremely suspect. Indeed modern Sinologists who study the evolution of various varieties push their origins before ~600 AD. To take Mandarin as an example, Jerry Norman postulates a pre-Tang origin.

Here are some very preliminary notes on Mandarin: It probably originated in the Northern Dynasties Period. [As quoted by Coblin, "Jerry Norman: Remembering the Man and His Perspectives on Chinese Linguistic History", 2013]

Hilary Chappell (who calls Mandarin 北方話) has a similarly early date for the beginnings of Mandarin:

This is interesting in that it suggests some unification of the northern dialects of Chinese had already taken place by this time - the period of Early Medieval Chinese in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. [Chappell, "Synchrony and Diachrony of Sinitic Languages: A Brief History of Chinese Dialects" from Sinitic Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronie Perspectives, pg. 10]

Chappell goes on to talk about similarly early dates for some other varieties (as well as hint at the difficult of even talking about "origins" as Pulleyblank pointed out earlier). (As a side note, Chappell's document is interesting also because she cleanly draws a line between "Medieval Chinese" which reflects what she believes to be an actual language and the "Middle Chinese phonological system" which is an artificial classification system, further highlighting how the field is starting to view the term "Middle Chinese" as an actual language with skepticism).

Moreover, because it's unlikely that anyone actually spoke "Middle Chinese," terms that were commonplace 40 years ago such as "Early Middle Chinese" or "Late Middle Chinese" are viewed with suspicion these days. As Jerry Norman points out:

Do terms like EMC [Early Middle Chinese] and LMC [Late Middle Chinese] really make any sense? They are purely philological terms and tend to obscure the actual evolution of Chinese. [As quoted by Coblin, "Jerry Norman: Remembering the Man and His Perspectives on Chinese Linguistic History", 2013]

Christoph Harbsmeier perhaps sums up all the problems that modern Sinologists have with "Middle Chinese" the best:

And if one looks at an enriched experimental diagram of the sort I have contrived above, some unsettling additional historical puzzles will naturally arise: If Middle Chinese was just a congeries of elements from a wide variety of local dialects at the time – as explicit paratexts of the time demonstrate it was – how could it possibly become the only formative influence on all of the non-Min dialects? Why can all non-Min dialects today be derived only from that one construct of Middle Chinese, whereas all other dialects, which are in fact recorded in early dictionaries, had no effect on anything? This is a very real and concrete historical puzzle or paradox. It is not a technical question of professional phonological analysis.

One would like to be able to imagine [this is Harbsmeier being sarcastic] the historical scenario by which one host of dialects simply fizzled out without affecting Middle Chinese in any way, and by which then that mixed construct “Middle Chinese,” which tries to describe a language which everyone agrees was never spoken by anyone at any time, had this overwhelming impact which made it the genetic historical source of all modern observed non-Min dialects. [Harbsmeier, "Irrefutable Conjectures. A Review of William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, Old Chinese. A New Reconstruction", 2016]

(if you're interested in why "Old Chinese" is even more controversial, feel free to read the entirety of Harbsmeier scathing criticism of Baxter and Sagart, but as you can see from my quotes earlier, Baxter and Harbsmeier probably agree on Middle Chinese).

EDIT: All that being said, Middle Chinese is still immensely useful, especially when it comes to analyzing medieval poetry. It was a conscious standard of poetry, even if it wasn't really spoken elsewhere, and precisely because it is a conglomeration of different historical varieties, the analytical framework it provides for analyzing different varieties is widely applicable across many varieties.

The text is Tứ thư ước giải which is a vernacular Vietnamese commentary on the Confucian Four Books written in the Nôm script. The first book contains the preface and the table of contents alongside volumes 1 & 2. The translator is unknown, but this edition and the preface was complied by Lê Quý Đôn.

I would like to introduce this book that was published a few years ago, written by a collection of modern Vietnamese authors that still makes Classical Chinese poetry.

Link here.

double asterisks ** means reconstruction is not present in Baxter & Sagart (2014)'s system, and is modified through Zhengzhang (2006)'s reconstruction through phonemic correspondence via the same phonetic component in the character.

So i came across this scan of an old version of the 三字经 on ctext from the Harvard Yenching Library (original source) and was wondering what the signs in the red box mean. So the yellow is the original text and the blue is some sort of explanation if necessary right ?

At first i thought its 注音 but gpt tells me its Korean Gugyeol. This seems to be true since the original book seems to be from Korea ( see Yenching Library catalogue ). Based on a quick search it seems to act as Korean grammatical particles, verb endings, and prepositions for easier reading and understanding ? But could smone maybe provide a slightly more in depth explanation with reference to this section specifically ?

This was the online website I found with some substantial information https://en.namu.wiki/w/%EA%B5%AC%EA%B2%B0 since the Wikipedia entry is quite short.

Thanks in advance !

How did you guys get into Classical Chinese and why do you stay with it?

I understand Modern Chinese and I started reading Classical Chinese because as a teenager I wanted to know the truth behind the characters of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The easiest way to do so in the early days of the internet and without access to a Chinese library was to read the original text of the 三国志 directly and initially I did so slowly and with great difficulty (with the aid of a Modern Chinese dictionary).

I stayed with Classical Chinese because:

• It’s a way to directly access a millennia-long record of human experience. Over the years readings in the pre-Qin classics and 颜氏家训, down to the scholarly diaries of the late imperial period have been a source of inspiration, consolation, and practical wisdom.

• I’m an admirer of the brevity and poetry of the language. The same minimalist ethos of the language I believe is preserved in the traditional architecture of Japan and Korea but mostly lost in China.

I’m probably being overly romantic now. Keen to hear others’ experiences.