Wow! Fascinating! My wife (Chinese) always tells me (jokingly) "classical Chinese is useless" (古文没用). Here is a really fascinating use case that had to wait a long time to come to fruition. Thanks for the excellent experiment, analysis and explanation.
Haha, yes, to some extent I actually agree with her, 'Classical Chinese is useless' for daily life! It reminds me a lot of the evolution of programming languages. For most modern coders, writing in something like Assembly is completely useless for their daily tasks. But the sheer art and elegance of maximizing every single byte of memory in those old languages is still deeply inspiring and artful.
I haven't read McGilchrist's book yet, but it’s fascinating that alphabetical languages feed into that linear processing, while logographic languages like Chinese force both hemispheres to collaborate. I'm actually starting a new section here to explore Classical Chinese. I feel it might be even more helpful for that cognitive rewiring, as it's fundamentally a purer logographic language.
Wow! Fascinating! My wife (Chinese) always tells me (jokingly) "classical Chinese is useless" (古文没用). Here is a really fascinating use case that had to wait a long time to come to fruition. Thanks for the excellent experiment, analysis and explanation.
Haha, yes, to some extent I actually agree with her, 'Classical Chinese is useless' for daily life! It reminds me a lot of the evolution of programming languages. For most modern coders, writing in something like Assembly is completely useless for their daily tasks. But the sheer art and elegance of maximizing every single byte of memory in those old languages is still deeply inspiring and artful.
I learned something new today. At my age, that's a treat.
Thank you and Substack.
Well...that was fascinating.
Unfortunately this is beyond my ability to understand properly, but still fascinating to read.
I haven't read McGilchrist's book yet, but it’s fascinating that alphabetical languages feed into that linear processing, while logographic languages like Chinese force both hemispheres to collaborate. I'm actually starting a new section here to explore Classical Chinese. I feel it might be even more helpful for that cognitive rewiring, as it's fundamentally a purer logographic language.