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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (1759)	11/16/1999 11:42:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

If the primary claim to fame of Lu Xun is that he wrote in the vernacular, than saying that he would be intelligible in ideograms is somewhat off point. Not at all! Suppose you were to write, in ideograms: Thou art a varlet. That would be very different from writing, in ideograms: You are a bum. Literary Chinese was (they say) full of archaic words and turns of phrase, as well as of out-of-date conventions. By dropping them, and using everyday speech instead, Lu Xun was writing in the "vernacular," even if he was employing ideograms. The only thing he could not do was to write in "dialect" (a la Mark Twain,for example). But "vernacular" and "dialect" are not synonyms.- Literary standards are variable, and I am dubious about the claim coming from a dictatorship. I wouldn't be dubious. The one thing Communist dictatorships have generally been good at is raising literacy rates, and fast. It certainly happened in the Soviet Union, where within a few decades literacy rates soon shot up to almost 100%. Why shouldn't the Chinese Communists have achieved a more modest 75%?