1. Why is the classical Chinese of the Qing Dynasty more difficult to understand Zhihu
This phenomenon does exist, but it cannot be generalized.
The more obscure classical Chinese works, such as "The Wolf" in Liaozhai, are indeed more difficult to understand than many classical Chinese works from the pre-Qin period. The main reason is that classical Chinese is ultimately a kind of writing, and writing is used to record language. If the ancients planned to create a kind of writing to record what they said every day, then the writing and grammar created by the ancients must be consistent with their daily speaking. Otherwise, they would be causing trouble for themselves, which would not be in line with their purpose of creating writing. .
In other words, in fact, at least in the pre-Qin period, classical Chinese was the vernacular spoken by people every day. For example, the Analects of Confucius recorded what Confucius' disciples recalled when their teacher was alive, which is equivalent to the "Record of Confucius' Daily Speeches". Therefore, in classical Chinese at that time, only certain vocabulary usages were unfamiliar to us, and some words did not change much and did not even need to be translated.
However, after the Qin and Han Dynasties, with the increasing evolution of spoken language, language and writing gradually deviated and became larger and larger. By the Qing Dynasty, they became completely different things. The spoken language of the Qing Dynasty is very close to ours now, but classical Chinese requires special study. Suppressed by feudal culture, shackled by ideas, and the eight-legged essay in the imperial examination reached its peak, many pedantic literati deliberately made classical Chinese extremely difficult to understand and did not speak human language. . Deliberately choosing those extremely rare words to show knowledge, such as Kong Yiji in Lu Xun's novels, for example, there are several ways to write "fennel" to show off fennel beans. If such a person writes classical Chinese, can it be easy to understand?
To put it simply, pre-Qin classical Chinese was the spoken language at that time, and there was no need to deliberately turn it into written language. In later generations, when spoken Chinese was separated from spoken language, classical Chinese was written for the purpose of writing written language. Some people in the Qing Dynasty went to the extreme. This is why some Qing Dynasty classical Chinese is extremely difficult to understand and does not speak human language.
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