Chinese Language and Civilization

[@seanyu6935]

So many mistakes. First, the exam system of bureaucracy was officially set in Sui Dynasty( 6th Century AD) instead of Han dynasty which was several hundreds years earlier. Before Sui, the official positions were taken firmly by the aristocrats as well. Second, the method of compounding different characters together to get a new word is only used in modern Mandarin. In classic Chinese, one character was a word, and the way to name a new thing was to create a new character. Third, water margin happened in Song Dynasty. You can say the book was first merged in Ming Dynasty but the story was based on the most famous riots against Song Dynasty rule. The most popular contents of Dream of Red Chamber is the beautiful and sad love story happened between young lord Baoyu and several petite girls. Fourth, you can be the governor because you can write a good poetry? Absolutely wrong idea. In Tang Dynasty for example, there are two different exams. One is poetry, the other is policy. The scholar passing the first one with his good poetry can only receive lower ranking position like county level while the counterpart passing the latter one with his good policy and solution to social problem can be awarded by the middle ranking position. If your final object is higher official in central government, you have to attend to specific lectures given by the government for years before you were qualified to get those high ranking positions. Fifth, Bureaucratic system was not always strong and influential. Before Song Dynasty, the main supporter and de facto ruler was imperial family and their relatives holding the military power. Only after Song, the bureaucratic system became the only medium between imperial family and its subjects. Welcome to more complement:-)

[@deleted01]

tl;dr

[@bookofodes]

Nice lecture! It is not easy to cover every aspects of Chinese culture in just one hour. But you did it. This kind of give me a sense that, although the history is long and the culture is unparalleled, we should not sleep on it. The whole story can be and should be told in one hour, and then we should get out of it for a totally new history. Thanks a lot for the lecture!

[@Wolfsbane909]

心+女+水=怒 So here we have "Heart"+"Woman"+"Water" = "Fury" or "RAGE". So when she feels bloated or watery when it's that time of the month >.> beware the rage! lol

[@shk00design]

0:45 got the date mixed up. The year 1800 "the exact end of the Qing Dynasty" you should have said the "decline" of the Qing Dynasty instead of "end". The dynasty lasted from 1644-1911 so the last date before the founding of the Republic of China should be 1911, not 1800.

[@devilsadvocate5817]

Great post. People should study more Chinese history, myself included. What a great topic that is important for world history.

[@lhongwong4053]

From the Oracle[inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th-11th century B.C.)] can be seen, "electricity[电]" and the Chinese Radical : "rain[雨]" had no relationship, Comparing the emergence of the word[電], "电" was much earlier to be found by the Chinese archaeologists. At first, "电" and "申" had very similar meaning, They both meaned "lightning", this two words were also very similar in writing and spelling. But this two words were drived towards different directions by history, their meanings and shapes also changed: [电], the word was added to a head of "rain[雨]" had become "電", that shows lightning is relevant to "rain[雨]" in most of the time. And the another word"申", the ancients believe that lightning is the power of God, so to "申",also meaned on behalf of the god. In order to distinguish from the former meaning"the lightning",people added the radical[礻],which means "to stand for" to the left side of the word[申], a new word[神] was created,it just means "the God". Then, word "申", from the view of its shape, a "日" was pierced by a long and vertical line "丨" through the top to bottom,so [申] also meaned "extended" or "stretching" . And then , people put the radical[亻] on its left side to make it a new word[伸]，which means "to stretch", such as "to stretch out one's hand[伸手]"or "to sretch oneself[伸懒腰]" etc. But"申"，itself ,until today,it remains the representation of abstract actions, such as" application[申请]"," to appeal[申诉] "," asserting justice [申张正义]" etc. "电"and"申" were twin brothers, but now, they are strangers, they have total different meanings. From "电" to "電", and then from "電" back to "电" ，is in line with historical development, and now "电"，means "electricity", affects all aspects of our lives,and it is no longer "電"（meaning "lightning"in ancient times) that can not be separated without "rain[雨]"

[@celovern]

Some corrections - Chinese and English are usually SVO - Subject Verb Object, unlike SOV languages such as Korean, Japanese, Hindi etc. furthermore there are important grammatical conventions to be dealt with in both Mandarin and Cantonese far from not having any grammar. Also conspicuously lacking was an explanation of tones!

[@rogerfaint499]

Dream of Red Chamber, The Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West are the 4 great literary classics. *Dream of Red Chamber is considered a literary work of the millennium, with more than 500 characters in the story.

[@JoachimderZweite]

One of my greatest regrets is that I never studied Mandarin in college when I was young but I did take two Chinese History courses and I loved them. I am studying Mandarin now and I find the Characters very challenging but also very beautiful and fascinating. I realize I will never really learn Mandarin but I keep at it because it is a beautiful journey.. I have just finished Carl Yung's forward to the I Ching and I have learned to consult the oracle with the 3 pennies. .........一个漫长的旅程始于第一步

[@journey2319]

加油！

[@lw8409714]

千里之行始于足下。good luck !

[@RitchieDiamond]

James Heisig is your man, check him out.

[@snsshorts]

The simplified Chinese writing system has allowed many foreigners to learn Chinese because you can type in roman characters (pinyin) to generate the Chinese characters.

[@philipchin2687]

the core thing about chinese 語+文,SPEAKING+WRITING, the writing is like maths symbol, toilet symbol, traffic symbol, in fact i have done myself a research that the chinese writing basically included all maths symbol and common symbols used in our daily lifes, not necessary meaning the same and most often they act as components inside a character. if you watch a movie without first known its title or name, doesn it matter? if you hear a piece of music without knowing its title or name, does it matter? that's one core thing about the chinese writing, we can learn about chinese writing without first pronunciing it. take Gold, Sivler, Bronze for example, if you know one of them, doesn't mean you can understand the other two, without further explanation, but for a Chinese, 金, 銀, 銅, understainding one of them will allow us to comprehend the other two are at least of the same kind, they are metal. the chinese writing is much used in storing mechanical and metaphysical information, as well as phonetical, the metaphysics is often comprised of a shorter stroke or dot meaning where your finger should point to, simplest one is 上下, above or below the horizon, the longer horizontal line means the horizon, the the finger is pointing above it or underneath, that's metaphysical. mechanical wise like examples芬草芳(BOTANICAL = branches going skyward), 林槍械(CARPENTRY=wood,weaponry), 狼犲豹(all animals with sharp teeth and four legs), 鵝鴙鴨(all animals stand on two feets with wings). you see, without ever learning how to pronuounce and seeing the real thing, we can tell roughly what are they like straight away after we have mastered some basics at young age. i am not saying the chinese language is the best, but it's the only one structured this way long ago and still in use, it has its afvantages and ofcourse disadvantges, for example, indexing is quite hard as we have to go counting the strokes before reaching where we should start, whereas the ABC makes it easy to find orders. however, the beauty of it is that it makes reading so much fluent and easy tht we can basically skipping on even we see characters first time, because we can relate the characters to its context much faster and efficient. by the way, there are at least 5 generations of chinese writing, much varied due to successive innovation in writing technique and after paper invention. those eaerlier ones before BCE220 are hardest to read , furst they are not unified and different places varied acccording to their lifestyles and perspective towards the subject, and intereaction between different tribes were limited, those were grouped as 大篆 OR ORACLE甲骨文 (up to BCE 1600), then from the first emperor (BCE220) onwards we had小篆(XIAOZUAN) unifying all different states' style of writing, and then 漢隸(HANLI) around year 100 directly from XIAOZUAN after paper invention but using the strokes goes from spherical curving to straight the Taiwanese now are still using this form (TRADITIONAL FORM), from XIAOZUAN onwards there are simplications but very minor, until the communist hademade another modern china's version which are largely based on 草書(CAOSHU) , the artistic forms started in the late Han dynasty around year 220. the modern China's version generated around 1950s is arguable incomplete relative to its forebears, as it is based on artistic form rather than the standard forms, it made many characters losing out and missing information.

[@bookofeye]

I like it very much! It’s what are the essences of Chinese civilization!

[@lhongwong4053]

从甲骨文上可以看出，“电”一开始和“雨”没半毫关系，“電”这个字的出现，比“电”要晚很多。一开始，“电”和“申”的意思很相近，都是“闪电”，也就是英语中“lightning”的意思 ，这两个字的写法也很相近。但是这两个字各自朝向不同的方向发展，它们的意思和写法也发生了变化：电，该字的头上被 加上了个“雨”，成了“電”，说明闪电大多时候与下雨相关，这个字的变化较简单；另外一个“申”字，变化就复杂多了，先是，古人认为闪电是神的力量所为，于是以“申”代表天神，后为了区分，才加了上“礻”，使之成了“神”字；后来，“申”字的字形上，在“日”字以一竖贯通上下，都出了头，所以有“延展”、“延长”的意思，再后来，人们又给“申”字的左连加上一个“亻”，使之成为“伸”字，代表“延展”、“延长”的形象的行为动作，比如“伸手”、“伸懒腰”等等，而“申”本字则保留作“延展”和“延长”意思的抽象的行为动作的代表权，比如“申请”、“申诉”、“申张正义”等等，自此，原本是一家人的“电”和“申”，分了家。 BTW，汉字从已发现的甲骨文发展到今天，是一个由简到繁，又由繁向简的过程，所谓“繁简之争”根本没必要，因为双方都是汉字的一部分，也同时各具优缺点。 从“电”到“電”，再从“電”回到“电”，是符合历史发展的，现在的“电”，早已不是那离不开“雨”的“闪電”了，它早已走进了我们生活的方方面面。

[@artugert]

After 14 minutes, I couldn’t listen anymore. It’s obvious this guy doesn’t understand the Chinese language at all. It’s funny how he mentions someone who translated poems without knowing the language, but here he is giving a lecture about the language without knowing it!

[@JoachimderZweite]

Many Chinese Texts were destroyed during the book burning of the Cultural Revolution but many copies have survived at Oxford and Cambridge and when Xi Ping visited the UK he did not ask for them back knowing that if they had not been preserved there they would be forever gone.

[@alan2here]

Any thoughts about translations of these classic ancient Chinese fictional books? One might make for an interesting/fun read.

[@mimikiryuu]

I like "Dream of the Red Chamber". The whole thing needs to be looked at and retranslated but I LOVE it. Truly a classic. I'm also a fan of "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio" but it REALLY needs an update seeing as Victorian sensibilities made them censor a lot. "Sitting down all night for a tea party" vs "Staying up all night drinking wine"

[@snsshorts]

You can find them at the Library of Congress. On the other hand there are plenty of movies made based on these four classics.

[@chiangchengkooi9791]

There is another great novel, Jin Ping Mei is sometimes considered to be the fifth classical novel after the Four Great Classical Novels, the englis title is tPlum in the Golden Vase", also translated as The Golden Lotus) is a Chinese naturalistic novel.

[@chiangchengkooi9791]

Many people do not know that ancient Chinese do not speak Mandarin..

[@rogerfaint499]

Imperial exams were more than the 5 Confucius classics . . . military treatise (even on Art of War (by Sun Tzu), historical figures, on past achievements of past emperors (how and why some were respected, benevolence by their actions/administration, etc, or loyalty and chivalrous characters of past generals). Exams were like thesis where scholars had to juxtapose their views, opinions and critical comments.

[@wli4053]

I am major in teaching chinese as a foreign language. It is very helpful to me to organize the material for my presentation.

[@alan2here]

"Nobody dies if you don't get coffee"?

[@plkoaituopi5291]

I think there is a minor mistake.The exam system as far as I know ended in 1905 rather than 1911 when the Minguo gouvernement established.

[@ttqc290]

I have read that a variant of the exam system continued in Taiwan after 1949 but it could have been fake news I guess

[@CA18DETHK]

This is not the best guy to talk about Chinese language, even as a foreigner, he's only got very superficial knowledge about the language let alone the development of it. Worse than I could do with English! One important aspect of Chinese language that has to be recognized is the demarcation between the time when writings had to be carved on bones and bronze (the Oracle) in the very ancient time (circa 2000-3000 BCE) and progressed to carvings on bamboo strips, the need to carve characters made the use of words extremely economical, i.e. the old text were highly abbreviated to save efforts in carving them out. That is one reason why most old text seems to make obscured sense and lack of structured grammar. Most old texts relied heavily on reference on other known stories to save reiterating them, so to somebody not familiar with all the stories and myth and events in context, it's very difficult to make full sense out of the text (notably those of the shijing and yijing) With the advent of paper making, use of ink and brush pen, the literary had expanded in depth and extravagance, you simply have the luxury to write more so much quicker and easier. There is one more notable flavour in the writings that because it is character based, there had always been the urge, from ancient to present, to arrange the writings in symmetry, in phrases of same number of characters for he beauty and impact of its presentation. This is most apparent in Chinese poetry, which not only have the structure of ryming of the end words, reconciling meanings between verses, but most importantly the rigid structure of number of characters in each verse, so there were classic 5 character verses, later 7 character verses, the long and short format, all classified and formalised. Not just in poetry but in all more formal works, in government official records, royal decrees, notices and circulars, even in scientific literatures, one sees a tendency to use symmetrical format wherever there is point to make, something to emphasize, to convey certain punch lines, to make things stay in lasting memory. One can appreciate the frequent need to abbreviate, omit or depart from grammatical structure to remain coherent with these formats. This is part of the reasons why the language is so difficult for foreigners to understand because the richness of it is so often hidden in the embedded and omitted part of the text which a condensed phrase referring to a whole other story add so much to the text for people who know about their meanings in a long continuous culture.

[@canman5060]

CA18DETHK This professor has only one hour to deliver a over 5000 years of written civilization.Please give him a chance.

[@blaccan]

Totally agreed, I think there should be another research on genetic of human. It can tell the IQ difference which is making the civilization difference.

[@georgeyu49]

CA18DETHK Great comment and explanantion on how the Chinese language works!!!

[@grasssmile]

Thank you Doc so very much for sharing all these to us!

[@bingeltube]

Lecture only, no images!

[@JazziePhazon]

But you lecture so well without notes, wes!

[@NangongReng1973]

Water Margin is set In the Song Dynasty ,not Ming.

[@YanyongW]

I think because of the difficulty of Chinese language.the hardness to memorize thousands of characters that make Chinese people smarter than general nation.

[@canman5060]

Yanyong W. Good in memorizing does not necessary mean the person is smarter.

[@bluechem5479]

+john smith how come you can't even speak Chinese? He can speak Chinese fluently and English with bad grammar, while your basic ass can only speak engrish.

[@kokwah5517]

@@canman5060 good in memorising does not mean you are intelligent but capable of learning and progress quick compare to those whom weak in memorise! Generally speaking!

[@bulu9214]

Smarter?? If they are smarter then they wouldn't have burn all their history in the name of cultural revolution.

[@snsshorts]

@@bulu9214 On the contrary, having the courage to start a cultural revolution is a sign of a great civilization instead of sticking to the old outdated traditions such as polygamy, foot binding, treating women as properties, etc. In fact revolutions happened with the change of each dynasty in China. China was able to catch up with the developed world precisely because China is not afraid of adopting new ideas and learn from failures. The same can't be said of all the great Western civilizations which have all but disappeared. Go back to your cave.

[@きくちよ-p3v]

some wrong details but still worth of watching

[@Wolfsbane909]

奴=slave/servant and if that's on their 心 heart = rage 怒 fury. Makes sense

[@yanfu9483]

I think you translate in a wrong way. 奴means slave, but it just indicates the pronunciation here. 心 means heart. Therefore, this character means an emotion word having same pronunciation as 奴. There are plentiful examples of this kind of formation of characters, such as 沐. One part indicates meaning, another part indicates pronunciation.

[@DucaTech]

What about India? Do they not retain their language & culture?

[@patrickc7248]

Wow, the quality of this video is terrible

[@aquillafleetwood8180]

Google, Kong Hee, Chinese and the Bible, Part 1, youtube!

[@by4bkj]

I want to tell you ancient Chinese was written in SOV order and this is why the written language of Japanese and Korean follows the same order of SOV. Because they learn language from China through copying Chinese scripts and reciting Chinese canons. Then they developed their own. Actually, Chinese does not care so much about the order to understanding the meaning. It is not alphabetical language and we adapt to SVO because it is easy to communicate with the Western.

[@bluechem5479]

Lightning+Brain=ComputerDian+Nao=Dian Nao电+脑=电脑dian (电）does not mean lightning wtf. lightning is lei (雷）。Got a bunch of other stuff wrong.

[@matthewbuchholtz4170]

+BlueChem As far as I know, 雷 is thunder, not lightning. Lightning is 闪电，which of course contains 电。It is correct that 电 is not lightning, however; it is more appropriately translated as "electricity," even if the connection is clear. You may be suggesting that the lecturer's explanation makes the Chinese seem a little sillier that it really is by describing 电脑 as "lightning brain" instead of the more accurate (and reasonable) "electric brain," and I would agree, but of course to a Chinese person it just means "computer" without consideration of its etymology (making it ultimately the same as English or any other language). I believe this last part is the lecturer's point, which is not only valid but, in my opinion, really good and important.

[@きくちよ-p3v]

电 means electron or electronic today

[@aquillafleetwood8180]

Your date of the "Old Testament", is laughable! Get real.....

[@nomadnametab]

he may not know anything of Hebrew and archelogoical discoveries. only the really old stuff is written in the ancient script. i am going to assume that the chinese characters have not changed that radically in most cases. and then there is sanskirt and dravidian language texts that go way back as well.

[@davidrapalyea7727]

@@nomadnametab The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in full cunieform in Summerian as recoverd and copied in cuniform by subsequent civilizations. The West has a literary corpus much older then Chinese. The epic dates to about 2000 bc just after the pyramid texts, I think.

[@神农-z1s]

too many mistakes

[@456qsn4]

It sounds beautiful, but not true. For a poor family it was impossible to have money and time to study and take the exam. Confucius is tedious and is a piece of shit.

[@snsshorts]

Wrong. Some of the brightest scholars and emperors in China came from poor families. Go back to your cave.

[@leonwalzer8744]

I stopped watching after the first untruthful things to come out of the professor's mouth: "If you go back to the year 1800, the end of the Qing dynasty, the largest economy in the world is China, one of the most advanced civilizations in any way you would care to record is China." Mr. Cecil, please look up the Great Divergence, and its drivers, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Europe, and their respective dates. No respected sinologist would tell you that the Qing dynasty (particularly towards the end) was an age of Chinese industry and prosperity. Needham, if you read his work, is addressing the many innovations Chinese civilization had produced in the past, long before even the start of the Qing dynasty. There's far too much intellectual dishonesty in academia these days, more often than not, motivated by some ideological agenda of blaming the west as the root of all the world's problems.

[@CA18DETHK]

It is generally true that the golden age of development in China were the Tang and Song Dynasties just before the Mongol invasion roughly during the period 600-1200AD and thereafter the country never quite recovered fully to its original track of development. The Ming after driving the Mongol out did develop a more elaborate government bureaucracy and notably a comprehensive system of codified laws base incorporating recorded case history which the court must follow as precedence (only to the extent of sentencing and applicability of charges, but not so much as to cover evidence and due procedure in obtaining a conviction). The Ming Code is to my knowledge the earliest comprehensive codified law in modern sense. The Ming also had grand maritime expeditions spanning several decades and demonstrated most advanced shipbuilding and navigation skills at the time. But everything took an abrupt turn when the emperor aspiring such missions died, China turned inward and closed its door to the rest of the world. The Qing had nothing much to accomplish in terms of cultural development as all warrior nomads types ruling regimes had been, they scored some significant military success and expanded China border to its present realm, incorporating Xinjiang and Tibet formally into imperial administration instead of being vassal states. By the onset of industrial revolution (1800), it is safe to say that China, although lagging behind the Western world in technological development and never emerged a full fledge capitalistic economy, still had the highest GDP in the world at that time. Partly due to the large population (300mil circa 1800) and large trade surplus before the opium trade. So whether you see a strength in the Chinese civilisation by 1800 is relative, but it was certainly lagging behind in a divergent trend compared to the West. If one applies the contemporary Chinese concept of comprehensive national strength, by 1800 China was definitely behind the west by a substantial margin.

[@canman5060]

CA18DETHK Great insight.This will shout up those extremely proud chinese nationalists.

[@CA18DETHK]

Unfortunately, I'm one of those :-)

[@jamesmackenzie3111]

+CA18DETHK then shut up!

[@blaccan]

Totally agreed, I think there should be another research on genetic of human. It can tell the IQ difference which is making the civilization difference.

[@silafuyang8675]

Many mistakes but as a whole, not a bad lecture. For people who do not know anything, it should be informative. "San Guo" storyline takes place during the Warring States period, not Han dynasty, but it's written later; "Shui hu zhuan" is based in Song dynasty, not Tang etc. many incorrect pieces of information. About the literature from the past, again incorrect. 99% is lost, destroyed by the change of regimes.

[@JoachimderZweite]

He lectures on too many subjects and he is master of none.

[@kc66]

Romance of the Three Kingdoms was indeed set at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (189-280 AD), starting from the Rebellion of Dongzhuo to reunification under the Western Jin dynasty. The story of the Water Margin, although written in the Ming dynasty, was set at late Northern Song dynasty (early 1100s).

[@456qsn4]

It is very bad and wrong to say "Mandarin", stupid! It is "Hanyu", or "Standard Chinese".

[@snsshorts]

Hanyu is racist. The official term is Chinese, no such thing as standard Chinese.