On Dec 25, 2003, at 2:25 AM, Jungshik Shin wrote:
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.
And, of course, it's not entirely clear that classical Chinese was ever really a spoken language. It certainly didn't reflect the way people spoke for the bulk of its history.
======== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
