Talk:Chinese language

Haven't done much at Wikiquote

but I assume everything we add should be direct text. The following passage of Lionello Lanciotti's "Lorenzo Magalotti and China" in East and West, Vol. 5, No. 4 (January 1955), p. 282, is fantastic but presumably Magalotti's original words would need to be found and more fully translated to include here.

"We begged him to tell us something about the language and its alphabet". It would seem that Magalotti, although about the same time he had—as shown by one of his letters to his friend Alessandro Segni—begun to study Arabic with enthusiasm, was eager to have news of this new Oriental language of which he seems to have known nothing, as he enquires "what its alphabet may be". When he is told that the Chinese language consists more or less of only four hundred sounds, and that it has no conjugations or declensions, it was only natural that Magalotti should exclaim that he was ready to undertake its study, as he felt that in eight days at most he could "master such a language so well that I might be mistaken for a Chinaman". This is followed by a courteous talk in which the Missionary explains to him that the scanty grammar of the Chinese language is accompanied by such a wealth of tones and ideograms that it is far from being as easy as might be thought. The language that was to be learnt in eight days is then seen by Magalotti to be a tongue possessing as many as 74,000 ideograms, made up of a series of marks, of "primary and composite" figures. The disappointment he feels when he realizes that he will never be able to master this language, sets Magalotti off on observations in which he compares the Chinese language to geometry, whose innumerable figures may be deciphered by geometricians, just as Sinologues "who do nothing else during the whole of their life than use their imagination to study the several forms of a number of words, succeed at last in memorising them and becoming fully acquainted with them".

The "Missionary" was Johann Grueber. Presumably, a newer translation could render "Chinaman" a little more carefully as well. — LlywelynII (talk) 14:47, 17 September 2024 (UTC)