From: hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (hua.t.lin)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 16 Apr 92 21:57:40 GMT
Article-I.D.: cbnewsi.1992Apr16.215740.24511
Distribution: usa
Organization: AT&T

In article <1992Apr16.171431.33535@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <1992Apr16.145737.10539@cbnewsi.cb.att.com> hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com 
>(hua.t.lin) writes:
>
>Because classical Chinese is basically a prolongation of the written Chinese
>of the classical period.

Classical Chinese looks more like an abreviation of some chinese language.
It is much more compact than the mordern chinese language in terms of number
of words used in expressing the same thing.

>All the modern dialects are separated from it
>by a period of 2500 years or so, time for plenty of linguistic change.
>As for why they're more like each other than like their ancestor, 
>I believe the separation into the modern dialects is considered to be
>much more recent-- perhaps only 1000 to 1500 years old.

This scenario contradicts the assertion that classical chinese was a
spoken language. If the dialects separated from it, and since it was a
written representation of speech, it would be fair to expect that one of
the dialects would be very close to the classical chinese (which is not
true).  Since the dialects diverged about 1500 years ago how did
all the dialects separated from classical Chinese 2500 years ago,
which was supposed to be the writing for a spoken language? If your point is
that 2500 years ago the spoken and written Chinese diverged, then it
would be fair to believe that written Chinese was not a representation of
spoken Chinese. At least the written Chinese was not a full, complete
and total representation of spoken Chinese. (We both had agreed that
classical chinese originated and was influenced by spoken chinese).

> .... , the written language certainly changed
>over this period too; but as the corpus of the ancient classics was the
>constant model, extreme changes were discouraged.)

No disagreement here.

>>Your Latin analogy does not apply to my question because French do not
>>resemble English, like Madarin to Cantonese! 
>
>No, it still applies pretty well.  English does not derive from Latin.
>If you look at the languages which do derive from it (French, Spanish,
>Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, etc.), in many ways they do look
>like each other more than they look like Latin.  For instance, they've
>all abandoned the Latin declension of nouns, the Latin passive voice,
>the Latin system of vowel lengths, and more.

No real disagreement here too. However, I do not like the word derive in
that it implies that some commitees decided to modify or change the
language. Also it implies the Franch, Spainish, Portugese, Italian,
Romanian did not speak until the Romans came along and gave them Latin
to modify and adapt to their liking. Wouldn't it be fair to think that
they all spoke a similar language long before the Romans came along with
Latin which merged with their language? The point is that if these languages
derived from Latin why didn't English, German, Greek, Egytian, Turkish derive
from Latin. After all, the Romans were all over the coasts of mediteranian.

- Lin