r/classicalchinese

Hello all. I started looking into the genealogy on my mother side of the family. She was born in Japan but her parents were Korean and her family moved back to Korea when she was young.

She married my Dad, an American, and has lived in the United States since around 1964.

She has a bunch of old documents that she says contains family information such as names, date of birth, and addresses. It is hand written on some sort of thin paper (maybe rice paper). She says it is written in Chinese (I'm not sure why) but Google translate cannot translate it well...seems to pick up a word here and there but then changes the word. We know one portion contains my Mom name but that's it.

I am adding one portion of the document in hopes someone may be able to identity it as a form of Chinese or steer me in the correct direction. I've tried to match with Chinese language but I dont have an eye for it and it is much more difficult being handwritten.

I'm hoping if I knew what form of Chinese, I could find an app to translate it. I'm reluctant to send the entire document anywhere as it probably containing too much sensitive information.

I greatly appreciate your help.

Edit: I want to say thank you to everyone for the quick response! I now know the document was written in old (post war) Japanese, which intermixed with Chinese. I'll have to figure out how best to get the docs translated. Thanks for pointing me in the correct direction!

Hi everyone,

While we are preparing the upcoming parts of our comprehensive resource list, today we want to show you an interesting piece that bridges all aspects of Early China: material culture, paleography, and textual criticism: the famous Stone Drums of Qin 秦石鼓.

Originally they were discovered near Fengxiang 鳳翔 in Shaanxi 陝西 Province during the 7th Century in the Tang 唐 Dynasty (618-906 AD). The ten boulders each vary in height (from 73 cm to 87.5 cm) and in diameter (56 to 80.1 cm), but each of them weighs around 400 kg. Today they are housed at the Palace Museum 故宮博物院 in Beijing 北京.

On the Ten Boulders are inscribed 10 songs, totally numbering around 700 characters (however only 501 characters where visible during the Song 宋 Dynasty (960-1279 AD) and only 272 today). These songs are about royal hunting and fishing activities of the State of Qin 秦.

What is also interesting to note is the correspondence between the Poems on the drums and the poems in the Shijing 詩經 (this also has interesting implications for linguistic studies, as we will show later). Each of the poems on the Stone Drums is arranged in columns and each line contains four characters (called siyan 四言), thus matching the gushi古詩-sytle of Poetry often found in the Shijing. The greatest resemblance can be probably found in the Xiaoya 小雅 and Daya 大雅 sections. Therefore they are also often called shigushi 石鼓詩 "Poems on Stone Drums".

They have also have fascinated scholars ever since their discovery as is shown for example by the poem Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770 AD) wrote about them or that Jinshixue 金石學 - beginning in the Song Dynasty - was named that way because of the Stone Drums (as shi 石 means "Stone").

Modern Scholarhip on the Stone Drums relies heavily on Rubbings 拓本 of their inscriptions because of their now damaged state.

For over a millennium, they have fascinated, perplexed, and driven paleographers and scholars to think more about them and discover their secrets.

1. Script

The script on the boulders is also particularly noteworthy. It represents what the Shuowen Jiezi 说文解字 calls Zhouwen 籀文 or Dazhuan 大篆 script, which is (regarding script "evolution") one of the two branches coming out of Bronze Script 金文 (so Qin script vs Script of the six States 六国古文). Later this script provided the foundation for the standardization of writing (221 BC) under the Qin 秦 dynasty (221 BC - 206 BC), using the Small seal script 小篆. It must be noted however that the script on the drums themselves is often called shiguwen 石鼓文 "Writing on Stone Drums".

2. Dating

Dating the Stone Drums is a difficult topic. Because the texts do not name any specific historical rulers, dating them has been one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in the history of chinese epigraphy and palaeography:

- Scholars during the Tang Dynasty thought that the Stone Drums date to the Time of King Xuan of Zhou 周宣王 (827 - 782 BC) and point to the connection with the Scribe Zhou 史籀, who worked at his court according to the Shiji 史記 and traditional sources (for this see for example the earliest commentator on the Stones Su Xu 蘇勖 (fl. 642)). It became clear at the heyday of Jinshi Studies during the Song Dynasty for scholars like Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修(1007-1072), that the Stone Drums must date later to the early dukes of Qin.

- During the 20th-century, prominent paleographers like Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877-1927) and Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892-1978) systematically studied and focused the dating. By comparing them palaeographically to bronzes from the Chunqiu- and Zhanguo periods it became clear that they must date during the Eastern Zhou, most likely either late Spring and Autumn or Early Warring States, so 5th and 4th Century BC. Guo Moruos work is especially noteworthy as his 1936 Shiguwen yanjiu 石鼓文研究 was one of the greatest Studies in the 20th century on the topic of the Stone Drums.

- However even then scholarly opinions diverge. The most authoritative western Study on the Stone Drums of Qin is Gilbert Mattos 1988 monograph The Stone Drums of Ch'in. Mattos dates the Stone Drums to the 5th Century BC. However chinese palaeographer Chen Zhaorong 陳昭容 dates them to the 6th Century BC based on the similarities in palaeography between the Stone Drums and the Script on the Qin Gong Gui 秦公簋. As an additional reference she also cites a stone chime and the Gui as well as the chime can be dated to the reign of Duke Jing of Qin 秦景公 (576-537 BC).

3. Why they matter for Old Chinese Linguistics

For historical phonology the Stone Drums provide additional information on the rhyme categories 韻部 of Old Chinese besides the usually used Shijing, Xiesheng 諧聲-Series and literature on Middle Chinese because of it's great similarities with the Shijing and rhymed nature in general. Therefore it can help to take them into account and not focus solely on the "usual suspects" when working on Old Chinese phonology (which the good ones like Baxter/Sagart obviously do to enrich their research). It can be also interesting when researching the Qin dialect in particular, although reconstructing Old Chinese dialects is a daunting task, because we have the oldest dictionary recording spoken dialects only from the Han 漢 Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) (Yang Xiongs 楊雄 (53 BC - 18 AD) Fangyan 方言).

It is also interesting to observe just how much poetic expression has already set foot in China since its first appearance was in the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou (1045 - 771 BC) period, which the prominent German Linguist and Philologist Wolfgang Behr has studied intensively in his 1997 doctoral dissertation Reimende Bronzeinschriften und die Entstehung der chinesischen Endreimdichtung.

Let’s Discuss!

1. Regarding the Chronology: Where do you stand on the dating of the Shigu? Do you align with the early Warring States hypothesis based on structural script simplification, or do you favor an late Spring and Autumn dating based on the Shijing-style vocabulary?
2. Methodological Question: When working with highly eroded texts like the Shigu, how much weight do you place on northern Dazhuan variant-dictionaries (like the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字) versus direct structural comparison with excavated Qin inscriptions (like the Qin Gong Zhong 秦公鐘)?
3. What are your go-to reference editions for studying the Shigu? (e.g., Gilbert L. Mattos' (1988) monograph, or Guo Moruos studies?)

Looking forward to hearing your insights and paleographical perspectives!

Yours sincerely,
The r/EarlyChina-Mods

I built this to assist my own study of Classical Chinese through The Analects, but I think this sub can benefit from it a lot as well.

The site contains 15,920 definitions, so each character's gloss is written specifically for the passage it appears in, and weighing 8 different English translations of the text. For example: the definition of 君 will show as "lord" in some passages, "to act like a lord" in other passages, and still others as half of the compound 君子.

I've also included 11,640 glossing units. These are multi-character terms like 君子 or 子曰, as well as sentence patterns like the "不亦...乎" that appears three times in Analects 1.1. If you hover over 君子 you will get not only the specific definition for that passage, but an explain that it can mean either "exemplary person/gentleman" or literally "a noble's son" depending on context.

Another feature: the pinyin is right for the classical readings. No generic converter, which is how some other tools end up with 說 as shuō and the 弟 of 孝弟 with dì. I set these per passage by auditing against a printed pinyin learner's edition of the entire book. And the annotations can be toggled off, so you can read bare and check yourself.

With 彩 Match, every passage has an Off / Match / Tones switch. 彩 Match colors the English and the Chinese it translates in pairs — tap a word on either side and it boxes its partner. Great for seeing how a terse five-character line unfolds into a sentence. Tone coloring applies per-passage tone background or character colors. Characters can display in traditional, simplified, whatever you want.

This is the standard "study" view:

analects.net/analects/1-xue-er?view=study

Some parts I built more for fun than anything else:

The classical editions. One tap sets the whole text as a Ming woodblock leaf — columns right to left, framed and foxed paper, vermillion reading marks, a fishtail on the fold, pages that turn — or as a manuscript in a brush hand where no two 之 on the page are drawn alike. Glosses still work; the big ○ before each passage taps open to its translation. Direct links, if you just want to look:

analects.net/analects/1-xue-er?view=block (woodblock)

analects.net/analects/1-xue-er?view=brush (manuscript)

Caveats, honestly: my own commentary covers 33 passages so far (there's a podcast behind it); the rest just carry Legge's 1861 translation — scrutable, dated, but no copyright. Start with Book 1 or Book 4 if you're trying 文言文 for the first time.

And if a reading looks wrong to you, please say so. I'd much rather be corrected than have someone learn a wrong reading from me!

I would like to introduce this book that was published a few years ago, written by a collection of modern Vietnamese authors that still makes Classical Chinese poetry.

Link here.

諸君安好！

I have designed a web application (mobile friendly as well) to learn Cangjie through deliberate practice. It's called Cangjie Workbook. It steps you through the Cangjie code locations, auxiliary forms for Cangjie codes, decomposition rules, then practice with common characters. There is a separate section for practicing with modern and classical texts once you are comfortable with the Cangjie basics.

I have included 千字文 for free along with a few basic lessons. No account is required, but progress will only be stored in your browser. If you make a free account, it will store your progress. I find it to be pretty fun.

https://www.cangjieworkbook.com/articles/thousand-char

I hope some of you find this useful. Any feedback would be great.

With pleased sounds the deer call to one another,
Eating the celery of the fields.
I have here admirable guests;
The lutes are struck, and the organ is blown [for them]; -
The organ is blown till its tongues are all moving.
The baskets of offerings [also] are presented to them.
The men love me,
And will show me the perfect path.

Vietnamese glossing (訓讀), albeit rare, uses ソ and ン to reverse the order of the characters similar to Japanese 返り点. However the marks are used on the right side. There is also a 丿 like mark that denotes that 之 should not move. The く tells the reader that the Chinese character should be repeated and not translated, etc.