Discussion Main / EternalEnglish

moved from main page.

• Only partially - maybe on the level of one or two characters, definitely not whole texts. While the written form of a character may not change much in a thousand years, just like a word its meaning can shift dramatically - 好 in Japanese means "(to) like", and in Chinese means "good". There's a poem written in Classical Chinese deliberately so that when read with modern Mandarin pronunciation, every single syllable is "shi", just with different tones - surely some of those words have long since fallen out of use.

This troper is able to read and undertand Tang and Sung dynasty poetry with little difficulty, the sounds may change meaning doesn't. The meaning of entire texts have remained intact as the traditional texts served as the basis of the civil service exams exams for over 2 millenia.

Can we have a translation of the page quote in a hottip, or would that defeat the purpose of having it in Old English? I can't understand it (which, I suppose, is good for the trope, but still).