The Ever Shifting Chinese Grammar
This is one of those really geeky topics that you’re probably not going to fully understand unless you have a little bit of familiarity with the Chinese language.
However, I’ll do the best that I can to make it at least somewhat comprehensible to those of you who don’t know the first thing about Chinese.
You see - the difficult thing about older Chinese grammar is that individual words never really had specific grammatical functions. In other words, Chinese has never really been a highly “inflected” language.
What we mean by “inflection” has to do with the conjugation of verbs and the declension of other words. This is the reason why you see so many European languages with all sorts of extra things tacked on to the end of certain words.
The cool thing about all the conjugations and declensions is that you can use rhetorical tricks, such as putting certain parts of the sentence at the beginning for emphasis. For example, drawing from this excellent Wikipedia article, you’ve got sentences like this:
Breve terrā iter eō, brevis nāvigātiō ab Naupactō est.
The journey there by land is short, and the sea journey from Naupactus is also short.
In this case, the adjective “short” is emphasized in the original Latin sentence. Both breve and brevis are declensions of the adjective brevis. In fact, you can tell which noun those adjectives belong to because of the declension, or the part at the end of the adjectives that changes.
You can’t do that in English, unless you’re writing poetry (and you do see it in older fashioned English). However, this sort of thing is a bit more common in languages more directly tied to Latin.
In this case, it’s obvious that breve and brevis are adjectives simply from their declension. The author also makes it easy to see what those adjectives modify, both because the declensions of the nouns and adjectives agree, and because they’re stuck together in the sentence. Now, you actually can find examples of sentences where the grammatical pieces of the puzzle are jumbled up - but that would be a completely different topic, and this really isn’t a linguistics blog anyway.
In Chinese there is no conjugation. There are no declensions at all. And, in a way that is difficult to understand at first, word order is usually the thing that determines the grammatical function of the word.
It’s interesting, actually. Both older Chinese and Latin have similar topic comment rhetorical styles. Or, in other words, you can take the most important part of your Chinese sentence and stick it at the front.
You can see that in modern Chinese, by the way - not just the older stuff. For example, I stayed up later than I should have the other night watching a football game on my iPad, which functioned like a television. My wife told me to go to sleep and stop watching television.
She could have said something like this:
你不要看電視吧。
Stop watching television.
However, because she wanted to emphasize the topic (television, or 電視), she actually saidt his:
電視不要看吧.
Stop watching television.
For foreigners learning Chinese, this can be kind of a hard thing to understand. It’s common for native speakers to omit obvious information from sentences and focus instead on the actual topic of discussion. And it can make it a little bit difficult for native speakers of Chinese to convey precisely what they want to say in a foreign language, since this topic comment concept doesn’t quite work everywhere.
And, of course, when word order tends to tell you how to understand the grammatical function of the words in your sentence, things like that topic comment concept can really throw you off.
We saw this in yesterday’s translation post, actually. Though you might not have caught it, we saw an adjective used as a verb. When Jia Zheng was speaking crossly with Jia Baoyu, he uttered this exclamation:
看仔細站腌臢了我這個地，靠腌臢了我這個門！
If I look too closely at you, all I can see is you dirtying up my floor and dirtying up my door!
The word 腌臢 is actually an adjective that means “dirty” or “filthy.” It shows up twice, giving us an interesting parallel structure. And, interestingly enough, there are verbs right before 腌臢: 站 (to stand) and 靠 (to lean against).
The 了 behind 腌臢 is one of those grammatical particles that drives students of Chinese grammar nuts. It is a particle that indicates a change of state. In other words, something was not originally 腌臢 (dirty), but became 腌臢 - likely as a result of standing (站) or leaning (靠).
And so, because of that 了, 腌臢 simply has to be a verb in this context - “to dirty.” It doesn’t make sense any other way.
But the problem here, of course, is that you can’t figure out what the grammar is supposed to be unless you know the entire context of the sentence. Chinese is an extremely contextual language to this day, and the older forms of Chinese are even more contextual than the modern forms.
And the sad thing to report is that this is just one of those aspects of the language that you have to develop a feel for. You can memorize the rules if you like - but even something as similar as how 了 is used ends up with so many exceptions to the rules that you’ll give up before you get anywhere. You’re honestly better off trying to get a feel for the language than trying to fit it into nice boxes.
Now, we also saw a much more difficult example of this at the heading of chapter 9:
訓劣子李貴承申飭
嗔頑童茗煙鬧書房
The Unruly Son is Admonished, and Li Gui Endures a Stern Rebuke;
A Stubborn Student is Scolded, and Mingyan Causes A Classroom Disturbance
I spent a lot more time trying to unravel this than I’m willing to admit.
李貴 (Li Gui) and 茗煙 (Mingyan) are both names - that much is clear. 承申飭 (endure a stern rebuke) and 鬧書房 (cause chaos in the classroom) are clearly parallel phrases consisting of a single character verb and a two character noun, and are pretty easy to read.
The hard part, though, is the topic comment part of the sentence, which seems entirely unrelated. In fact, it is entirely unrelated from the rest of these lines, even though it’s written in a parallel poetic structure.
訓劣子 literally means “admonish the unruly child.” 嗔頑童 is very similar: it means to yell at the stubborn pupil.
But the grammar here is completely ambiguous. It’s clear that it’s a topic in both sentences that comes before the rest of it. But who is performing the action of scolding and yelling?
My first instinct was to translate it something like this:
Scolding the unruly son, Li Gui endures a stern rebuke;
Yelling at the stubborn student, Mingyan causes a classroom disturbance.
Now, there are two problems with this.
The first problem, obviously, is that this translation doesn’t reflect what happens in the chapter at all. Li Gui is in no position to scold the unruly son (likely Jia Baoyu), and Mingyan is a student who is in no position to yell at a stubborn student (also Jia Baoyu? I guess we’ll find out).
The second problem is there’s no obvious logical connection in either case between the first three character phrase and the rest of the line. I suppose yelling at a stubborn student could cause a disturbance. But why would somebody be rebuked for scolding an unruly son?
Anyway, after puzzling over this for a while and looking at other translations, I decided that the verbs 訓 and 嗔 are likely passive verbs.
Now, normally the Chinese language uses particles to mark passive verbs. You add on a helping verb in modern Chinese like 被 (or sometimes 讓, or 叫, or 受, or even 給 in very colloquial situations) to show that the verb is passive.
However, when we’re dealing with poetic language and poetic descriptions, we’ve got to allow the language the flexibility it deserves.
If it makes you feel any better, I doubt most native readers of Chinese would recognize at first glance that the first verbs in both lines are actually passive. But it would naturally make sense if they carefully read the chapter and then revisited the heading.
Anyway, hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight into the process. It’s pretty geeky stuff, sure, but it’s also fascinating.
If you want to learn more, you can check out this Wikipedia article on Classical Chinese grammar. Classical Chinese is actually much worse at this sort of thing than the colloquial novels. And, as is the case with classical Greek, classical Latin, and their many derivative languages, Chinese poetry takes this sort of thing to the extreme. But we’ll see more of that later.