> compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much
A Millere was there / dwellyng many a day
As any Pecok / he was proud and gay
Pipe he coude and fisshe / and nettes bete
And trne cuppes / & wel wrestel and shete
Ay by his belt / he bar a long panade
And of a swerd / ful trenchaūt was the blade
Middle English is much more similar to modern English than Classical Chinese is to modern Chinese (of any variety), for the obvious reason that Middle English is separated from modern English by less than half the period separating Classical Chinese from modern Chinese.
fair enough. i was told that by a old/english scholar and i checked wiki sample text to confirm, but i must have been mistaken.
>Middle English is much more similar to modern English than Classical Chinese is to modern Chinese (of any variety), for the obvious reason that Middle English is separated from modern English by less than half the period separating Classical Chinese from modern Chinese.
i think it depends on the specific text in question, but i'm drawing blanks because im not very informed on old lit in general. again tang poems are taught at an early age, but perhaps most text would be harder to read
This is more fair. As yorwba points out elsewhere, though, some pretty large differences between Old Chinese and modern Chinese are masked by the fact that Classical Chinese is always presented with modern spelling[1]. (Other, larger differences are fully apparent.) To be more closely analogous, you'd render "þæt wæs god cyning" as "That was good king" -- and suddenly the gap from "that was good king" to "that was _a_ good king" doesn't look so large.
[1] There are good reasons for this; since Chinese writing bears very little phonetic information, we have only limited knowledge of what Old Chinese sounded like in the first place.
This is nonsense. Here's some middle english (taken from https://www.chaucermss.org/?manuscript=Dd&tale=GP&version=si... ):
Middle English is much more similar to modern English than Classical Chinese is to modern Chinese (of any variety), for the obvious reason that Middle English is separated from modern English by less than half the period separating Classical Chinese from modern Chinese.