Letter from Xiao Shen, Grade 16 of the Department of Chinese:
"I would like to ask the teacher about the definition of 'authentic Chinese' in relation to the translation. Is there a yardstick for evaluation of this 'tunnel'? For example, take the language of the late Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic as the authentic standard, or use the smooth speech of the Chinese cognition as the standard? ”
When I answered the question , " Can machine translation meet the needs of interpersonal communication " , I proposed two criteria for judging authentic Chinese sentences. One is a unique rhythm and rhythm, and the other is a unique understanding and tacit understanding. (See the WeChat public account article "If machine translation is strong, is it still necessary to learn foreign languages?") "——Where is the pain point of the machine translation that scares the language teacher out of a cold sweat? 》）
In fact, whether it is the literary language of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty, or the smooth written language today, there is only one criterion for judging whether it is authentic, that is, it is clear and natural.
Classmates may say, aren't these two criteria? In fact, clarity and nature complement each other. Nature is easy to be clear; clear, it is natural.
Nature is a clear condition. Those sentences that read unnaturally, sentences that are "stagnant", its semantics are incomprehensible and difficult to understand.
And once the meaning of a sentence is clear, it means that it uses its own form to maximize its efficacy.
In human verbal communication, the most effective form of language is not the form of enclosing itself with complex rules, but the form of triggering consciousness with the simplest possible strategy.
I have said many times that, fundamentally, the linearization of linguistic forms is both a whole and a constraint on the expression of meaning.
Rectification makes the meaning organized and thus clear; at the same time, the wholeness itself pays the price due to abstraction and linearization, making complex and multidimensional information singular. Therefore, the true restoration of meaning needs to rely on the joint efforts of linguistic forms and contextual associations.
Without the former, meaning is in a state of chaos, puzzling by the lack of understanding of the dimension — do you want to "break into the Kanto", or "go west", or "go down the South Sea"?
Without the latter, the understanding of meaning draws away a rich connotation, which is incomprehensible and even misunderstood because of the single dimension.
Chinese has made great efforts in the complementarity of language forms and contextual associations, and "pearls and combinations". Authentic Chinese has four "works":
1. The work of the mind
We pointed out in the 1980s that if Western grammar is a kind of morphological grammar, that is, the interrelationship of words is expressed through morphological changes and various conjunctions and prepositions, then Chinese grammar is a kind of ideographic grammar.
The so-called meaning is manifested in the fact that the combination of Chinese characters has no specific requirements in form, and only pays attention to the coordination of meaning. Most of the so-called "improper collocation", "subject-verb incompatibility" and "unmatched action and object" are mostly not "lexical" problems, but semantic logic problems.
When two words are juxtaposed, it is not because they match in morphology, but because they coincide in meaning.
When a word modifies another word, it is not because they are consistent in sex, number, or lattice, but because together they produce a relationship of modification, limitation, and supplementation.
Two causal segments are combined one after the other, only because the reasoning is correct, not because the tense and physical forms of the verbs in the two segments are used correctly. As Wang Li said: "As far as the structure of sentences is concerned, the Western language is ruled by law, and the Chinese Chinese language is ruled by man." ”
The meaning of the Chinese language goes beyond grammar in the Western sense, but also beyond logic. In Chinese, illogical combinations such as "recovering fatigue", "cleaning", "eating in the canteen", "basking in the sun", "recuperating", and "fighting fires" can be legal in the caring meeting.
Every Chinese character and group of characters is essentially a fulcrum of meaning. One meaning, the combination of Chinese always uses the method of extracting the fulcrum of meaning, so that the expression is as refined as possible. There are many examples of Chinese grammar that have become classics:
"A phone call came"
"Three days off is not enough"
"Two Beijings"
"Three hours by train"
"This kind of head has no place to buy a hat"
"A red light, all at once lined up to Chongwen Gate"
"Peanut rice wine"
The meaning of these examples often needs to be explained in a few sentences, but Chinese only need to choose a few representative words to put together when expressing and understanding.
Does this mean that Chinese has no grammar? To be precise, Chinese does not have the grammar of Western languages. Humboldt expressed a deep understanding of this in his essay "On the Nature of Grammatical Forms and the Characteristics of the Chinese Language". He said:
"The grammar of any language is always partly explicit, revealed by means of tokens or grammar rules, and hidden, assuming that no markup and grammar rules can be conceived";
"In Chinese, the proportion of explicit grammar is extremely small compared to hidden grammar."
2. Mobile work
The predicate of a Sentence in a Western language is acted as a qualifier verb. If other verbs appear in a sentence, they are in an unqualified form to show how they differ from predicate verbs. In this way, sentences in Western languages have a "scale", that is, an organization centered on predicate verbs. As a result, the extremely cutting mode of "subject-predicate" and "active guest" has become the norm for Sentences in Western languages.
According to our linguistic survey of Lu Wenfu's novella "Well", the sentence of the "active guest" type accounts for only nine percent of all sentences. A large number of sentences appear in the form of flowing sentences.
Even in "active guest" type sentences, which account for nine percent of the total number of sentences, half of the sentences are long objects. That is, the beginning of the sentence is "Who knows...", "You didn't see..." "You can say..." "Look at you...", "I want to...", and the components behind them are regarded as objects by the "active guest" mode. And these "objects" are so long—
"Xu Lisha feels that that era has been a long time ago, the May Fourth Movement is anti-feudal, and it has been anti-feudal for forty years, how can this old lady still talk about three from four virtues?"
The so-called "long object" is not an extension of the object, but is essentially still the flow of sentence reading paragraphs. This flow is in chronological or logical order, rather than being controlled by a verb as the center.
Zhang Zhigong once talked about an example in "Dream of the Red Chamber": Liu Grandma first entered the Rongguo Mansion and was talking with Wang Xifeng, "Just listening to the sound of boots and feet all the way, a seventeen or eighteen-year-old teenager came in, with a beautiful face, a handsome figure, a light treasure belt, and a beautiful costume. ”
If you put it another way, it is not impossible to say that "a seventeen or eighteen-year-old boy came in, with a beautiful face, a handsome figure, a light fur belt, and a beautiful costume", but Chinese was not very accustomed to it. Because this European-style long fixed sentence reads and holds my breath. And the "Dream of the Red Chamber" such a statement, the long fixed language into a prescriptive sentence read flow, the tone of the flow is natural, and in line with the order of the matter, because Liu Grandma heard the boots all the way, the first thing that caught her eye was definitely a teenager, and then she saw his appearance.
3. The work of fiction
Virtual reality and consciousness are almost two sides of the same coin. Because of the intention, in the form of language, "people are detailed and I am omitted" - you know, what else can I say? For example:
"He has a daughter who works in the suburbs and has called and can arrive in the afternoon."
The perpetrators of the last three segments of this sentence (the so-called "subject") can all be understood, so naturally they are "invisible".
Interestingly, these "invisibility" components are irretrievable—Chinese sentences have been organized without regard to their identity. This organized sentence is completely self-consistent in structure and leaves no place for those "hermits". Students can try it:
"He has a daughter, [this daughter] works in the suburbs, [we] have called, [this daughter] can arrive in the afternoon."
Is such a conversation natural? Does it sound like a foreigner who learned Chinese says? Obviously, once the "invisibility" component in parentheses is restored, the Chinese sentence is unacceptable because it does not speak like Chinese.
Chinese speak, one will not say what the listener has already understood, and the other will not be "complete" in every segment, appearing bloated. The layout of Chinese's speech is "between virtual reality".
Chinese as soon as there are more things to understand, the sentence is no longer a mechanical entity, but begins to unclog and flow. Here, the work of virtual reality and the work of flow are complementary.
It is in this sense that we say that Chinese is temporal and Spanish is spatial.
When we say that Chinese is temporal, what are we talking about?
We're talking about Chinese have a lot of meaning,
We're saying that Chinese organization is fluid.
We are saying that the construction strategy of Chinese is between virtual reality and reality.
After the introduction of Western grammar systems and theoretical methods, modern grammar in mainland China is accustomed to the block thinking of Western languages, that is, a qualified language organization must have a strict structure, tense relationships, and no "loopholes", while the sentence organization that Chinese "unclogged" is flawed. Therefore, the mainland grammar community has "consulted" some of the more typical Chinese sentences, saying that they are sick:
"Guests are warmly welcomed wherever they go."
"When he woke up, he felt his right arm heavy and swollen."
"Through my studies, I have raised my awareness."
These very natural expressions have been diagnosed by modern grammar as the absence of a subject.
A natural body is diagnosed as sick, who is sick?
Modern grammar is sick, and the disease is that it cannot be eaten.
4. Figurative work
Closely related to the Chinese's consciousness, flow, and virtual reality, it is a concrete method. Chinese deeply aware that -
Only figurative, rather than abstract, can we encompass the rich meaning and overcome the limitations of linear forms;
Only figuration can make the organization of language dense and transparent;
Only concreteness can make the Chinese's literary tone not blocked, the segments not to be rigid, and natural flow.
Chinese figurative thinking has many manifestations, just one example or two:
A juxtaposition of figuratives.
The example we gave above: "Come in a seventeen or eighteen-year-old teenager, with a beautiful face, a handsome figure, a light qiu bao belt, a beautiful costume Huaguan", of which "light Qiu Bao belt, beautiful clothing Huaguan", without the verb "wear" or "wear", only the four costume images are combined together, and the teenager's costume is ready to come out. Students here are easily reminded of the ancient text of "dead vines and old trees and crows".
In fact, the figurative juxtaposition in this sentence is not just "light treasure belt" and "beautiful costume Huaguan". The reason why we can easily see that these two four-character grids are figurative is because they have no verbs, and this is still the concept of Western grammar. In Chinese sentence organization, as long as it is a meaningful structure of "骈", whether there is a verb (predicate) or not, it has a certain degree of concreteness.
The typical structure is the four-character grid. Therefore, "beautiful face, handsome figure, light fur belt, beautiful clothing and crown", are essentially figurative juxtapositions.
The second is figurative freeze frame.
Chinese sentences use noun objects to convey the state of action when describing behavioral events, which is the "highlight moment" of Chinese figurative thinking. For example:
"Little Pepper jumped up, a lightning-like slap, and tong Shaoshan was dizzy."
"Jumping up" itself is already a four-character grid narrative, with a certain degree of concreteness; and "lightning slap" is like the instantaneous freeze frame of the action picture, with the noun "a slap" vividly conveys the dynamic behavior, the reader hears it, and it is vividly remembered.
The example sentence we talked about before, "The eldest lady looks at her back, a long sigh, two lines of hot tears", is the same figurative freeze-frame.
From these sentences, students can vividly feel how the figurative management of Chinese is closely related to the management of consciousness, flow and reality.
When these operations work together, tunnels Chinese moored out.
When "one jump up" and "a lightning slap," "a long sigh" and "two lines of tears" are put together in an orderly manner, we think of the Russian film theorist Eisenstein's "rational montage."
Eisenstein said: "The opposite column of two montage shots is not the sum of two numbers, but the product of two numbers." ”
The Hungarian film theorist Baláz further explains: "Once the upper and lower shots are connected, the meaning that was originally hidden in the various shots is emitted like a spark. ”
Another Russian film theorist, Pudovkin, defined montage this way: "Transform the inner connection that lurks between the phenomena of life into a connection that seems to be obvious, clearly visible, and can be felt directly without explanation."
The "product" mentioned here, "the unusually rich meaning hidden in the various shots" is emitted like a spark, and the "latent internal connection" and "clearly visible, can be directly felt without explanation", all point to the great effect of figurative combinations.
And this kind of thinking, in Eisenstein's view, is the Chinese character thinking of Chinese - montage is like a "dog" character plus a "mouth" character in hieroglyphs, indicating that the dog barks.
Eisenstein, who drew wisdom from the structure of Chinese characters, did not know that the grammar of Chinese was also "rational montage".
Chinese Chinese character thinking and grammatical thinking are similar and psychologically homogeneous, which is a new topic in Chinese cultural linguistics.
Seeing such a topic, is the study of middle-Chinese linguistics in the 21st century in the eyes of the students full of charm?