Querneus wrote:Axon wrote:...
I don't know if my memory is failing me, but are you the one who once mentioned a certain oddball Taiwanese professor from like the 1960s who wrote a grammar of Classical Chinese in Classical Chinese, who thought the abandonment of the traditional written language had been basically a historical mistake? I'm trying to find the post, if you did, but I can't find it. Do you know the professor I'm talking about?
I'm afraid not, though I hope you find it!
I can second the recommendation for Kai Vogelsang's book on Classical Chinese. It draws on the most up-to-date information we have about pre-Han writing, which is a field that evolves much faster than I had imagined.
Without taking up too much air here, as my literacy in Chinese is eternally weaker than I would like it to be, I want to clarify a couple of things that certainly confused me for a while.
When speaking of written Chinese, there is a spectrum of literariness and classicalness with several dimensions. Written Chinese before the Han dynasty is considered to be "Classical Chinese," while some people refer to later non-vernacular materials as "Literary Chinese." The first may have been fairly close to the way people spoke on a day-to-day basis, while Literary Chinese stayed more static over time. So the language style used in, say, a Ming nonfiction work would not be the same as the language style used in the Analects or in Tang poetry, though I certainly started out thinking of them all as falling under the sphere of "Classical Chinese."
I bring this up because there are actually several very nice resources for learning later-period Literary Chinese that were published in the 19th and early 20th century. For those authors, Literary Chinese was not an object of curiosity or of historical importance; it was the language in which they were required to conduct all written correspondence with any literate Chinese person. I'm thinking specifically of James Summers'
Handbook, F. W. Baller's
Mandarin Primer, an anonymous
Lexilogus of the English, Malay, and Chinese, and T. L. Bullock's
Progressive Exercises in English. There are similar works in French, German, and Latin, all on Google Books.
My enjoyment of Literary and Classical Chinese comes from these books as well as from carefully reading the East Asia Student blog to get a sense of the words and structures found in poetry. I also highly recommend reading multiple translations of the same poems or prose pieces once you can parse the meaning of each character.