Bulletin Summer 1979

Cantonese as literary Chinese for pai hua is by and large based on northern dialects. It is in fact easier in a sense to learn literary Chinese: we have a corpus which can serve as model, through which the grammar and vocabulary of literary Chinese may be learned. On the other hand, there is no comparable corpus in pai hua, and the evolution of pai hua wen since the thirties has rendered some of the famous works of that time less readable as a result of change in what is acceptable in style. Furthermore, in translating from Cantonese into pu tong hua, some of the finer shades of meaning is bound to be lost. In other words, writing in pai hua is not as easy as one would like to think. However, a good knowledge of literary Chinese will enhance one's ability to write better pai hua wen, as he may draw upon the rich classical vocabulary, and fall back, if necessary, on the more closely- knit and compact sentence structure of literary Chinese for conciseness. I also feel that translation helps us to master the skill of writing pai hua wen. We normally take translation to mean rendering from one language into another, but it should also include rendition from literary Chinese into written colloquial Chinese, the two being very different. In the process of rendering, one has to be faithful to the original and yet produce a readable translation in pai hua wen. Once we have achieved this there will be little fear of relapsing into westernized sentence constructions which violate Chinese grammatical rules. To prove my point, I wish to point out that many famous English writers are well versed in Latin and have been well trained while at school to translate Latin accurately into readable English. Indeed, a deep-rooted and sound tradition in translation is a great help to the development of a language and its correct usage. Q. But China is not lacking in a tradition in translation. Did not the Buddhists in China translate their sacred scriptures a long time ago? A. I must say Buddhist translations never led to the building up of a healthy tradition. Since it is the sayings of the Buddha that were translated, strict adherence to the original was required, and translators of the Sutras had therefore to resort to direct, word-for-word translation, at the expense of readability as Chinese. In this sense, the translation of Buddhist Sutras proved unsuccessful, and a sound tradition of translation failed to grow up in China. It should also be noted that the Indians were very advanced in the study ofgrammar since very early times. Had China introduced the study of grammar from India at the same time as Buddhism, she would not have to wait until the 19th century before the first grammar appeared, and language teaching might be very different from what it is. Q. Are you planning to compile a 'classical Chinese- English' dictionary? A. Yes. Traditional Chinese lexicography suffers from two major drawbacks. First, indication of the actual usage of characters is often neglected ； secondly, synonyms rather than definitions are used for explanations. The earliest Chinese dictionary, Erh Ya (爾雅)， is a mere collection of glosses from ancient works. Each entry is defined in this dictionary in the form of ‘A is B' with no attempt whatsoever to distinguish between ‘A'and 'B'. This approach in fact reflect the Chinese mentality—the Chinese tend to look for similarities rather than differences between things. This mentality explains why we have many expressions like 'different routes lead to the same destination' and ‘the three religions stem from the same source' . Coming back to the dictionary I plan to compile—it will only be a dictionary of a given period because I feel that the compilation of dictionaries should be on historical principles and a preliminary step is the compilation of dictionaries of different periods. The period I have in mind is from 300 B.C. to 100 B.C. I shall feed all available texts of this period into a computer. In most of the existing dictionaries, each entry is explained by quoting annotations from classical works, each quotation constituting a separate meaning, but some of these meanings are in fact identical. Therefore, we will have to reorganize the material and regroup them under clearly-drawn definitions in our dictionary. Further we shall also give examples to illustrate the usage of a word under each meaning. On Philosophy Times have completely changed. Does ancient Chinese thought still hold good for today's society? 8