I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. It all depends on how your mind works, or what statement you have.
Do you require ambiguity, and inferentialness to be explicitly clothed as such, as in Chinese, or can you take the words themselves, that can be concrete meanings, and use them as a jumping point to infer on your own? As in English.
There's also a very strong way in which this statement is not true, because if we assume that the text contains transcendental universal truths, saying that it can only be accurately expressed in Chinese, is suggesting either that it's a uniquely Chinese truth, so it's not universal, or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true.
So I think rather than thinking of a translation, think instead of what statement do you have of the truths reflected in a particular form in that original Chinese text. What statement do you have of those truths in whatever material you're working with, be it a language or something else?
And it's funny to talk about much being lost, because the text itself readily and repeatedly admits that the truths it talks about cannot be accurately expressed. In fact, it highlights the limitations of language, of the original Chinese it was written in, to accurately and fully convey what it is talking about.
So I think it's nonsense to say that, “oh, so much is lost when translating from Chinese”, and it's entirely the wrong way to talk about it, and kind of a lazy worshipfulness that's unworthy of that, I think, in this context entirely.
So liberated from those constraints, I think you can be free to consider, well, what is it talking about? And also to think about that and come up with your own translation.
So back to the original point, I don't think you have to lose something when you're putting it in English. Here's my attempt:
The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord.
Btw, What does your regular Chinese person think about this book? I know it’s very popular in the west. Is it popular in Chinese speaking regions as well? What do people think about it?
> I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true.
> or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true.
Well, as stated a few moments ago in a previous comment:
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I'd be (genuinely) curious if you had more precise inputs as to why Chinese language (pictographic) wouldn't be more expressive than Western's (alphabet-based): I think there's reasons to not be so quickly dismissive.
> The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord.
Well, aren't you for example losing here the echo to the daiji? With all its "philosophical" significance?
> Btw, What does your regular Chinese person think about this book? I know it’s very popular in the west. Is it popular in Chinese speaking regions as well? What do people think about it?
A few isolated data points: most Chinese persons I know consider classical Chinese "old unreadable stuff" and don't seem to care much for it. But plenty of Westerners (Europe) don't care much for old Western texts either (e.g. Iliad, Plato, Bible).
Thank you for your reply. Let me think about it when I have time and get back to you! :) Are you Chinese, btw? I don't know if that's relevant, I'm just curious
I thought about it some more and what I have so far to add to my instinct/intuition/feeling about it is: entropy is the same, as measured by entropy of distribution (radicals/glyphs/glyph-bigrams/trigrams/etc (Chinese morphemes) by frequency vs radicals/morphemes/word-clusters by frequency of other languages); stroke count is similar between glyph or glyph-bigram/trigram and a word/word-cluster equivalent in other languages; the glyph is simplistic compared to a "picture" in the sense that the aphorism "picture worth 1000 words" typically applies.
Chinese glyphs don't really tell a story, any more than the etymology of words in other languages tell a story; if a language was really "more expressive" it should display results consistent with that, such as, for example: it is significantly harder to learn (then we must consider Finnish or Hungarian as more expressive than Chinese, say); also, speakers of it should be significantly more accomplished and as a group occupy a higher standard of living/intellectualism than speakers of other languages; ethnic groups where those languages dominate should be "genetically superior" to ethnic groups where less expressive languages dominate.
Obviously all such tests are problematic haha! :) But I think we can see that by playing such thought experiments there isn't really any difference between all human languages. However, we could compare the "language" of chimps, or other beings who we have ascribed language to, to rank "below" human languages on these scales and see clear and significant trends consistent with the tests, for example, outlined above.
I could go on, but I think it's fairly easy to make various cases for the essential expressive equivalence of large majorities of human languages. And I think it's harmful, abusive and bigoted to pretend superiority of one language/culture over others especially without basis.
I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. It all depends on how your mind works, or what statement you have.
Do you require ambiguity, and inferentialness to be explicitly clothed as such, as in Chinese, or can you take the words themselves, that can be concrete meanings, and use them as a jumping point to infer on your own? As in English.
There's also a very strong way in which this statement is not true, because if we assume that the text contains transcendental universal truths, saying that it can only be accurately expressed in Chinese, is suggesting either that it's a uniquely Chinese truth, so it's not universal, or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true.
So I think rather than thinking of a translation, think instead of what statement do you have of the truths reflected in a particular form in that original Chinese text. What statement do you have of those truths in whatever material you're working with, be it a language or something else?
And it's funny to talk about much being lost, because the text itself readily and repeatedly admits that the truths it talks about cannot be accurately expressed. In fact, it highlights the limitations of language, of the original Chinese it was written in, to accurately and fully convey what it is talking about.
So I think it's nonsense to say that, “oh, so much is lost when translating from Chinese”, and it's entirely the wrong way to talk about it, and kind of a lazy worshipfulness that's unworthy of that, I think, in this context entirely.
So liberated from those constraints, I think you can be free to consider, well, what is it talking about? And also to think about that and come up with your own translation.
So back to the original point, I don't think you have to lose something when you're putting it in English. Here's my attempt:
The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord.
Btw, What does your regular Chinese person think about this book? I know it’s very popular in the west. Is it popular in Chinese speaking regions as well? What do people think about it?