On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Christopher John Fynn wrote: > BTW are the classical written languages of China & Japan more or less the > same thing?? I understand that the Chinese Buddhist canon is also used by > the Japanese without translation so I assume that there was (/is?) more > or less a common written language - at least for that kind of material.
You can think of 'classical Chinese' as 'Latin/classical Greek' of East Asia. Up until 'recently', learned people in Japan, Korea (and presumably Vietnam perhaps until the 19th century) are well-versed at _classical_ written _Chinese_ just like learned Europeans were with Latin and classical Greek, which doesn't tell you anything about their proficiency in modern Greek. BTW, unlike classical Greek and Latin that are rather close to most European languages, classical Chinese is heavens apart from Japanese and Korean of any age. I guess Vietnamese is a lot closer to Chinese than J and K in most metrics. Buddhist canon may be a little different story. My understanding is that some of them are 'transcription' (not translation) of Sanskrit (or Tibetan) so that there's no point in translating. Jungshik
