Re: The Chinese "white horse" paradigm

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Brian Betty wrote:

> B.Philip Jonsson asked: "i don't get that one. did you ever read the
> Chinese "white horse" paradigm?"
>=20
> In Classical Chinese, yes. A wonderful text, if utter nonsense in transla=
tion.
>=20
> Bai ma fei ma
> "A white horse isn't a horse"
>=20
> where fei is specifically a negative copula, hence the confusion in Engli=
sh.
>=20
> Fei is a marked verb, a negative copula, where the English "isn't" isn't
> really marked. It makes a lot of sense in CC, but it's just "Alice in
> Wonderland"-ese in English. And you think this is hard, try translating
> poetry instead of linguistic science of the 3d century BCE from Classical
> into English. The texts get so hacked up they are utterly unrecognisable.=
 I
> read Zhuangzi in Classical Chinese and I didn't recognise a word of it
> except when I did a close reading of the same passage!
>=20
Wasn't Zhuangzi a bit pre-classical, and hadn't the bamboo strips
come unstuck, or is that theory pass=E9? Of course, I've never graduated
much beyond Mencius and Tang poetry, buut those were fairly readable.

What I found really hard was Classical Tibetan - all those sentences full
of unimpeachable grammar, with a vocubulary that wasn't beyond me either,
and I just couldn't get the meaning of the texts. (Always excepting
those little ditties by the umpteenth Dalai Lama. Those were easy ;-).)

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt