Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Who the hell uses the word gaol anymore?

Pelliot was amazing. Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, Sogdian, Turkish, Arabic, plus the major European languages. He denied knowing Japanese but since he allegedly plagiarized Japanese publications that may have been a deception.

Chapter 25!

It's a shame that the one reliable translation was done by somebody who simply had no skill in English literary composition.

Finally, chapter 57! The next 44 chapters are on average longer as I'm just over half done. But the story just seems to really be picking up. 杨六郎 has been sent to the frontier in Yunnan!

This is such a great story. A true traditional Chinese tale, not the kind of thing people who only value Western literary traditions would like.

This chapter on Old Chinese absolutely doesn't fit with the rest of the book. We've got perhaps intermediate level historical discussion for 200 pages followed abruptly by an extremely high level linguistic discussion with almost no explanatory material, and then a return to history for another 300 pages. The chapter would fit if it were written for the audience one can expect to be reading the rest of the book.

I hope chapter 22 is the hardest chapter. This castigation of Cao Cao is written in some of the most flowery language I've yet seen in Chinese. Some of these hanzi don't even appear in Pleco and I've most of the extensions! Yet neither of my Chinese copies explain those characters (yet they explain fairly basic words like 饕餮 (a fav word of mine) & 擐！) and it seems to have been glossed over in Roberts's translation.

A whole chapter in a single sitting. I rarely even accomplish that with English books. Now we seem to be entering the start of the coverage in 大军师司马懿 so I expect it'll be even easier to read.

I had hoped that this would not be too alien to me, with minimal knowledge of Korea outside of the dozen or so dramas and couple novels I've read. It doesn't really expect much knowledge of Korean (though knowing Chinese characters helps a lot), but all the names of Korean intellectuals are completely foreign to me and so it's hard to keep up with what exactly he's talking about sometimes.