10 Lesson 9 -燕人

Grammar Note 8 

Some caveats (courtesy of Prof. Zeitlin)

1. To the Western student, what is most interesting about Chinese word formation is not so much what there is of it, since there is so little, but instead what is not there. For example, unlike nouns in English and other European languages, a Chinese noun is not required to carry an overt mark to show whether it is singular or plural, or whether it is the subject or object of a verb. Nor does a Chinese verb indicate person, tense, mood, etc. The meanings expressed by obligatory endings on nouns and verbs in the extraordinary complicated morphological systems of such languages as Latin and Greek are in Chinese optionally, indeed rarely, expressed by an occasional pronoun, adjective, or an adverb. When it is said that Chinese has no grammar, what is meant is that Chinese lacks this sort of noun or verb morphology. This lack of a developed morphology is one of the reasons why the definition of parts of speech is difficult in Chinese … .Instead, Chinese grammar is easier to describe in terms of the meaning of words and in terms of their syntax.[1]

2. [One might] assume that having first studied some textbooks and then having read around in Ancient Chinese literature one has simply learned Classical Chinese just as one might learn Classical Greek by studying standard Greek or Latin grammars, assuming that dictionaries equip one quite adequately to read ordinary Greek or Latin texts. Anyone who, for example, is constantly forced to look things up in cribs and commentaries when he reads De bello gallico [Caesar’s Gallic Wars] in Latin will be taken for a raw beginner. Likewise, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that our knowledge of Ancient Chinese is in many respects still at the stage that corresponds to that of the student of Latin who reads De bello gallico with a crib hidden under his desk. It is not just that we do not have an adequate theory of Ancient Chinese grammar (that we could live with). No, half of the time we do not really know for sure what exactly Ancient Chinese sentences mean , even when we feel sure what an Ancient Chinese sentences mean, we are still often uncertain how it comes to mean what apparently it does mean .[2]

3. [The fondness for brevity has remained one of the outstanding characteristics of Classical Chinese.] Words that could presumably be supplied by a thoughtful reader on the basis of context were often left unexpressed, so that the student of Classical Chinese is sometimes led to conclude, despairingly, that even in the later centuries of the language, he is still dealing not with a medium for communication of new ideas but a mnemonic device for calling to mind old ones. Is it too much to ask that the writer indicate at least the subject of the sentence? he may ask. In the case of Classical Chinese the answer is usually, yes.[3]