From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Thu Dec 25 2003 - 04:25:52 EST
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
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