User Comments - johnnyzuqiu

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Do you guys ever have any fun learning this language?...because it's kinda hard to tell.

Also, my fake name is spelled johnny, not johny ;)

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Hi tingyun and podster

Thanks for your responses. Very interesting. You almost buried me with the avalanche of words, but it was worth the read.

I can see why you would be frustrated tingyun, but I think the blame is misplaced. Shouldn't we blame the education system for teaching the alleged "wrong" pronunciation? I think Cpod did well here: they gave us a situation, gave us the vocabulary and pronunciation we are most likely to encounter in that situation, and you were able to go deeper into the topic in the comments section, which gave us a basic idea of the controversy surrounding this kind of issue (and as of yet, no rogue linguists have been called in to dispute your wild claims). The system works! I feel like I'm getting my money's worth here.

Also, maybe in Part 2 of this series, we find out that the girl failed her final exam because she was pronouncing the word incorrectly the whole time...stay tuned!

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

*Or is it better to say that at one point "le4" was the standard pronunciation for 乐...

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

tingyun

I really like your passion for this topic.

Here are some of my thoughts after reading your comments:

1. If, as mentioned above, all children in China are taught the "yue4" pronunciation for this passage in school, then this lesson's dialogue is 100% accurate because that it is what you would hear in this situation in China. 

2. I am far from a language expert, but I know that language is constantly changing. Seeing how people today who speak Chinese use different dialects, have different histories, live in different regions, and have different vocabulary and pronuciations, can we really say for certain that 乐 was pronounced a certain way by everyone who spoke the language 2000 years ago, and that this was constant and didn't change for a period of hundreds of years? Or is it better to say that at one point "yue4" was the standard pronunciation for 乐, but it may have evolved from or into something else. After all, the two pronuciations for 乐 (yue4 and le4) must have originated somewhere.

3. And if, as you mentioned, a post on an internet message board cannot be considered scholarly debate, does that then disqualify your above comments from the discussion?

Anyways, thanks for some very interesting posts on this topic.