[HN Gopher] Thousand Character Classic
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Thousand Character Classic
Author : histories
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-03-06 11:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| RaoulP wrote:
| Amazing. It's like their
|
| "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
|
| But with no repeated characters!
|
| Although since characters are words, I guess that "room for
| interpretation" affords some combinatorial leniency, which you
| can't get when spelling latin words.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English
| without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of",
| "is". And just to show off, the Qianziwen holds a bunch of
| those words for the very last line!
| yorwba wrote:
| 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 Tian Di Xuan Huang Yu Zhou
| Hong Huang 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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)
| chris_st wrote:
| Or:
|
| > [The novel] "A Void", translated from the original French
| La Disparition (lit. "The Disappearance"), is a 300-page
| French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges
| Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following
| Oulipo constraints. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
| lupire wrote:
| _La Disparition_ / _A void_ isn 't just "without using
| that fifth glyph"; it's about a world without that fifth
| glyph, and uncanny discomfort from not having it but not
| knowing why, and trying to find illuminating truth.
|
| Also, http://reddit.com/r/AVoid5
|
| If you don't want to visit that community, you can ask
| ChatGPT for non-fifth-glyph writing, most of which looks
| as if it is a copy from that community.
| egypturnash wrote:
| also, there is https://dolphin.town/ which plays a slight
| variant on this game :)
|
| (and sadly will complain about expired certificates when
| you visit it)
| chris_st wrote:
| I was on an early mastodon instance where the fifth glyph
| was prohibited. It was really tough for me to do posts,
| but there was a person who was getting their PhD in
| linguistics, and if you didn't know that they had to
| avoid that letter, you'd never guess. Just amazing
| writing.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| It can also function as placeholder text just like Lorem ipsum.
| eru wrote:
| Strangely, they don't say anything about a translation into
| English.
| userbinator wrote:
| Google tried its best but not surprisingly doesn't work well on
| poetry; it begins with "The sky and the earth are dark and
| yellow, and the universe is primitive. Covering this body and
| hair are the four elements and five constant elements."
|
| And contains such amusements as:
|
| "Gong Wei Ju Yang, how dare you damage it."
|
| "It clears up confusion and benefits customs, and everything is
| wonderful."
|
| "Upgraded to accept the emperor, turned into a star of doubt."
|
| "The world is luxurious and rich, and the car is fat and
| light."
| canjobear wrote:
| 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.
| samus wrote:
| 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.
| sudasana wrote:
| This text only dates to the 6th century CE
| yorwba wrote:
| Check the bibliography and external links sections, e.g.
| http://www.camcc.org/_media/reading-group/qianziwen-en.pdf
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| The very first link under "External links" of the Wikipedia
| page: "Transcribed, _Translated_ and Annotated Thousand
| Character Essay by Nathan Sturman "
|
| https://www.angelfire.com/ns/pingyaozhuan/tce.html
|
| The meanings conveyed by the text is not very unique or useful,
| and this is especially apparent once translated to another
| language. It provides practically no insight to anything, as
| this isn't a true classical text.
| maxrmk wrote:
| > By the Song dynasty, since all literate people could be assumed
| to have memorized the text, the order of its characters was used
| to put documents in sequence in the same way that alphabetical
| order is used in alphabetic languages.
|
| I struggle enough with 26 letters! I genuinely can't imagine
| this.
| mbivert wrote:
| There are mnemonics to help remember the characters. For
| example:
|
| - Ji (jealousy) is composed of Nu (woman) and Ji (illness,
| hatred): jealousy is a feminine illness or a manifestation of
| feminine hatred;
|
| - Huo (to be puzzled) is composed of Xin (heart, intention)
| Huo (maybe, possibility): an unsure heart;
|
| - Yu (to be stupid) is composed of Xin (heart, intention) Rou
| (trample) Tian (field): the heart of someone who tramples a
| field (and thus ruining the crops);
|
| etc.
|
| You often have to be creative. If I understand the research
| correctly[0], finding such interpretations used to be common,
| and different people would debate different interpretations.
|
| I've actually wrote a tool to help studying Chinese from that
| perspective, by allowing to read classics such as the Thousand
| Character Classic[1], and systematically decomposing
| characters.
|
| [0]:
| http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf
|
| [1]: https://zhongmu.eu/book.html#c=2;w=0;b=qian-zi-wen
| (~unusable on mobile screens).
| est wrote:
| > I struggle enough with 26 letters! I genuinely can't imagine
| this.
|
| alphabets are like x86 instructions of phonemes, Chinese
| scripts on the other hand is the "bytecode" of many languages
| (mandarin/cantonese/you-name-it). The first emperor of China
| unified text writing but not the pronouciations
| geraldwhen wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's a Languagelog blog post from years ago on the
| difficulties that even native speakers of Chinese languages
| have in looking up words in dictionaries. Collation is a
| serious problem.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| What a strange coincidence. I just picked this up in my local
| library about two hours ago. I just returned home now.
| sudasana wrote:
| It's difficult to overstate the importance of this and similar
| primer texts from this period. Every literate person not only in
| China but elsewhere in the Sinic reading world would have
| memorized this as a child. You might not speak the same language,
| but you could both read and write this set of 1000 characters.
|
| Was also used for a Keno-style game that spread across the
| Pacific! https://games.porg.es/games/pigeon-lottery/
| est wrote:
| > Every literate person not only in China but elsewhere in the
| Sinic reading world would have memorized this as a child
|
| Nah, Qian Zi Wen is mainly used for practice calligraphy, are
| you thinking of Three Character Classic (San Zi Jing ) ?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| Yes, Qian Zi Wen is not common in mainland China at all. I
| was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory of
| the content of Qian Zi Wen other than the title.
|
| San Zi Jing on the contrary, is ubiquitous. I am guessing
| everyone heard of the first 2 terms of San Zi Jing : Ren Zhi
| Chu Xing Ben Shan , 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.
| kevinwang wrote:
| > Yes, Qian Zi Wen is not common in mainland China at all.
| I was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory
| of the content of Qian Zi Wen other than the title.
|
| But the original content is talking about the past, not the
| modern era.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| 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.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| I would, however, add that traditional Chinese character
| learning involved the complete memorisation of a text,
| followed by learning the characters associated with each
| word of that text. Learning individual characters in the
| way we think of as "traditional" today is actually a modern
| innovation compared to how people used to do it. In that
| context, memorising a text that consists of 1000 purely
| unique characters takes on a different character, even
| though I would think people would be better served just
| memorising more useful texts.
| DinaCoder99 wrote:
| 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.
| notresidenter wrote:
| It's good to know that TCC was pushed by the Chinese leaders so
| that their people could read but couldn't think and write
| independently -- those thousand characters are not enough to
| write anything intellectual in Chinese. Nowadays, the program
| expects that 3000 characters are known in the third year of
| primary school. A modern dictionary has 7000-8000 characters. The
| Shuowen (edit: Kangxi Dictionary), the dictionary used by the
| elite in that period to make all literary writing very hard to
| read by using archaic characters contained 47000. TCC is very
| political and symbolic.
|
| See Lu Xun's essay in _Qiejie ting zawen_.
|
| Could expand more on it if someone's interested.
|
| Edit: change "government" to "leaders"
| fmbb wrote:
| Which Chinese government when?
|
| These poems are supposedly 1000-1500 years old. I don't think
| many governments (or kings, chieftains etc.) anywhere were very
| liberal back then.
| notresidenter wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| That's a rather idiosyncratic interpretation. If you want to
| write something rebellious insulting the emperor, Huang Di Bei
| Su Wu De , the thousand characters have got you covered.
|
| Same for the intellectual first sentence of Confucius' Analects
| Zi Yue : Xue Er Shi Xi Zhi , Bu Yi Shuo Hu ? And of course
| people would also study other texts that would introduce them
| to additional vocabulary.
|
| Your character count for the Shouwen dictionary is way off, it
| has less than 10000 distinct characters, and its primary
| purpose wasn't to provide obscure characters for use in new
| texts, but to provide easier-to-understand definitions for
| characters found in old texts. A tool to ease understanding,
| not hinder it.
|
| I'm not sure which of Lu Xun's essays in particular you're
| referring to, but in general his beef was with the continued
| use of literary Chinese, not that people weren't being taught
| enough characters to write in it.
| notresidenter wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| I'm having difficulty finding an essay by Lu Xun under the
| name Hua Yu . Maybe if you mentioned the year of
| publication, I could find a scan of the newspaper... I
| certainly don't have a physical copy of his collected works
| where I can just check page 86 and know what you're talking
| about. Wikisource has digitized versions of much (all?) of
| his writing, can you find it in there? https://zh.wikisourc
| e.org/wiki/Author:%E9%AD%AF%E8%BF%85#%E9...
|
| I did find another text where he brings up the thousand-
| character classic:
|
| https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E7%8C%96%E6%9C%83
|
| Ji De Na Shi Ting Ren Shuo , Du <<Jian Lue >> Bi Du <<Qian
| Zi Wen >> , <<Bai Jia Xing >> You Yong De Duo , Yin Wei Ke
| Yi Zhi Dao Cong Gu Dao Jin De Da Gai . Zhi Dao Cong Gu Dao
| Jin De Da Gai , Na Dang Ran Shi Hen Hao De , Ran Er Wo Yi
| Zi Ye Bu Dong . "Yue Zi Pan Gu "Jiu Shi "Yue Zi Pan Gu ",
| Du Xia Qu , Ji Zhu Ta , "Yue Zi Pan Gu "He ! "Sheng Yu Tai
| Huang "He ! ......
|
| _I remember hearing someone say at that time that reading
| "Jianlue" is much more useful than reading the "Thousand-
| Character Classic" or "Hundred Family Surnames" because you
| can get a general idea of everything from ancient times to
| the present. Getting a general idea of everything from
| ancient times to the present, of course that would be good,
| but I don't understand a word of it. "Yue from Pangu" is
| just "Yue from Pangu", read on and remember it, "Yue from
| Pangu!" "Born in the wilderness!" ..._
|
| (It appears that he misremembered Da Huang as Tai Huang :
| https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=56603&remap=gb )
| notresidenter wrote:
| The year is 1934. I'm going to try and find it (this may
| take some time).
| yorwba wrote:
| I found the August 24, 1934 issue of Shenbao
| https://archive.org/details/shenbao-1934.08-226/mode/2up
| but I couldn't spot the article in there. (It's amusing
| that the front page has a huge ad for school textbooks.)
| notresidenter wrote:
| 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.
| notresidenter wrote:
| Actually, I've found Lu Xun defending exactly that in the
| part VIII of that essay.
|
| This is absolutely not an "idiosyncratic interpretation".
|
| Imperfect translation: "Expressing one's own thoughts with
| this was impossible, the number of characters being far too
| small. In short, it was as if a prisoner had been given a
| little space, but limited in such a way that he could walk,
| stand, sit or lie down, without the possibility of jumping
| out of the cage installed for him."
| resolutebat wrote:
| The Japanese equivalent is the Iroha, a famous poem that's also a
| perfect pangram of kana syllables and used as the traditional
| sort order for Japan:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha
|
| Plus as a poem it slaps:
|
| Although its scent still lingers on
|
| the form of a flower has scattered away
|
| For whom will the glory of this world remain unchanged?
|
| Arriving today at the yonder side of the deep mountains of
| evanescent existence
|
| We shall never allow ourselves to drift away
|
| intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.
| bentley wrote:
| I'm also reminded what's almost the inverse, a Chinese poem
| consisting of a single repeated syllable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
| Pikamander2 wrote:
| Stuff like this really makes me appreciate phonetic alphabets.
| Even if I've never seen a written word before, I can still sound
| it out and gain some clues on what it means.
|
| I'm surprised that Chinese never became at least a hybrid system
| like Japanese. Kanji can still be frustrating to learn, but it's
| usually mixed with hiragana/katakana and sometimes includes
| furigana for uncommon kanji or for texts aimed at younger
| readers.
| Tier3r wrote:
| Chinese is quasi-phonetic, the right side (or if the character
| is only made of one section) strongly suggests the
| pronunciation of character. The number I have been told by my
| tutor is 70% of the time it is similar.
|
| Far bigger of a problem to me seems to be how many characters
| are pronounced the same. I suspect that the common usage of it
| avoids words that sound the same and cause confusion, but it is
| still a problem.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| 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".
| siraben wrote:
| 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,
|
| Tang was pronounced /*lka:NG?/ and Yang was pronounced
| /*laNG/, but the modern pronunciations are tang (/tkaNG214/)
| and yang (/jaNG35/) respectively. So the phonetic part Yang
| /*laNG/ no longer consistently represents that sound,
| although in this case the final -aNG is still present.
|
| And as for sounds that were present in Old Chinese but not in
| Middle Chinese and Mandarin, like [2] Xun was pronounced
| /*sqku:ns/, now xun (/cyn51/), 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_classific
| ati...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese
|
| [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%BD
| gwd wrote:
| I've been studying Mandarin since around 2010. For various
| reasons, about 8 months ago I started studying Biblical Greek.
| After about a week, once I'd got the letters down, it was
| amazing HOW MUCH easier it is to learn when you can Just Read
| words you've never seen before!
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(page generated 2024-03-08 23:02 UTC)