Alien Kind

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• Since classical Chinese was no longer a spoken language, no classical tale could be an exact transcription of what someone said; the written accounts are inevitably translations. The vernacular was precisely for those genres in which capturing someone’s exact words was key. We should not, however, make the mistake of equating the classical language with erudite and the inaccessible and the vernacular with the popular and the comprehensible. A simple classical writing with a limited vocabulary and regular sentence structure could, for someone with a rudimentary classical language education, be easier to read than more verbose vernacular, with its wider range of vocabulary, sentence structures, and colloquialisms. (查看原文)

  [已注销] 2017-10-24 17:46:48

• I would argue instead that commentary is a genre in its own right, with its own conventions, and that the relationship between story and commentary is not one of absolute containment and restriction of meaning. After the mixed pleasures of the narrative, the commentary offers the more straightforward pleasure or moral righteousness. (查看原文)

  [已注销] 2017-10-24 17:59:29