The differences between 也者, 者 and 者也
While reading the Lùnyǔ, I came across a grammatical feature of classical Chinese that I hadn’t noticed before: 也者. Apparently, when offering interpretations, you can put 也者 after the noun, verb or adjective that you are discussing, as opposed to merely using 者, the normal particle of nominalisation. The Chinese Text Project (CTP) database returns 318 hits for the combination 也者, and it’s found in almost all major works from the late Spring and Autumn period and the early Warring States period. Here are some examples, with links to the relevant CTP pages that provide the entire text, an English translation and a link to its dictionary that can give you Pīnyīn readings and useful, albeit not perfect, glosses (to see these, click the blue button).
純也者，謂其不虧其神也。(Zhuāngzǐ)
夫達也者，質直而好義，察言而觀色， 慮以下人。(Lùnyǔ)
友也者，友其德也。 (Mèngzǐ)
或也者，不盡也。(Mòzǐ)
This made me even more curious: why didn’t the author simply use 者 in these sentences? So I turned to Edwin Pulleyblank’s Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. No luck there, however, as I was unable to find anything on 也者. I then grabbed my copy of 古代漢語語法學 by 李佐丰, a wonderful 550-page reference grammar. As with many Chinese academic works, there is frustratingly no index, but after a couple of minutes I found a bit on 也者 and two example sentences, on page 258. It devotes a majestic 19 characters to 也者, explaining that in sentences where speakers offer their own interpretations of a concept, 也者 rather than only 者 can also be used after the subject.
Of course, I’d already figured that out myself, so that wasn’t really helpful. Does anyone know if there’s been any further research into the differences between 也者 and 者 in this context? And is there a difference in meaning between 也者 and 者也, which also seems to be used in similar contexts? Is 也 a topicalisation particle in both cases? It would be good to find out more.
By the way, I’ve still got quite a few topics I plan to discuss in the coming weeks, but if there’s anything you’d like to see a post on sometime, be sure to let me know in the comments!
Love your blog, thanks for providing it. I’ve been a teacher and amateur student of Mandarin in Taiwan the past seven years and am only now really taking a stab at “classical Chinese.” My baihua is at a high level by now and I opt for Chinese learning materials. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff here seems to presume a knowledge of the classics just to use wenyanwen textbooks, which is sort of a cathc-22. Here’s a request: do you know of a list of the “essential function words” in wenyanwen? Things like zhe, reng, er, ye, etc., which crop up over and over again and are the skeleton of the grammar? Sort of like the “highest-frequency” words (as, say, Pimsleur employs them). I grasp enough vocabulary-characters that getting the content of much of the wenyanwen I read (esp. e.g. Tangshi Sanbai Shou) is not hard; it’s those “function words” (as I call them) which trip me up. Do you “know my mean”? Thanks again, I’ll stay tuned to your blog.
Thanks, those are good leads. I found the SCP lexicon at the Wanjuan website as well as some other handy documents online about 斷句. I also happened to have just written a long post at my blog about the difficulties of learning Chinese and my diffidence about “diving into” 古文。;)
Best,
I’m in Pulleybank and am picking through assorted other resources I’ve gathered. It’s fun!
I’ve had your question about these three phrases on my mind ever since I saw the post. While I was reading the third or fourth chapter of Pulleybank’s Outline earlier this week, I noticed he said 也 can sometimes be used as an adverbial marker of continuation. (I will have to provide specific citations if and when I find them later at home.) I also notice he says some words appear frequently in some authors and almost never in others, the difference being based on dialects. My hunch is that instances of 也，也者，and 者也 must be parsed as either i) suggesting a sustained or, perhaps, especially emphatic belief or description of a state of affairs, or ii) simply reflections of ancient phonology in the author’s (and readership’s) respective dialects. But again, I am far too incompetent to offer more than this hunchwork.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s indeed quite common to come across dialectal differences in classical Chinese. This is partly because of regional differences, and partly because of temporal differences. But 也者 appears in almost all major works from the late Spring and Autumn period and the early Warring States period, which makes it all the more interesting.
Although probably tangentially related to phonology, I think it is likelier that this is a syntactic issue. At any rate, it would be fair to say it has been slightly neglected in studies of early Chinese.
On a side note, lexical statistics have been compiled for many works and they generally show the amount of lexical items employed in any one work to be quite limited. For example, Chinese History: A Manual points out that the Analects only contain 1,382 different characters (not the same as lexical items, of course) in a total of 15,883 characters. I’m not aware of any comparative statistical studies of the lexical items used in different works, however.
Again, thanks for commenting!
The (aspectual) point Pulleybank makes about 也 is on p. 118 of Outline (XII.2b et relata).
Again, keep up the good work, it’s a fine little blog here.
I’d love to see a 白话-文言 online translator (like Babelfish), or perhaps a Firefox app that alters Mandarin to Classical (akin to the Swedish Chef app which makes all normal English into… Swedish-Chef-ese). Any thoughts haha?
Thanks for the reference! And about the Firefox plug-in: I read enough badly 文言ised Mandarin already, thank you very much, haha 😉
Point taken.
It is a bit incongruous to seek ultra-modern tech solutions for ultra-old literature. 😉
This seems to be the closest to a ‘running’ conversion of wenyan-baihua: 初中文言課文詳譯精析 http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/lookinside.php?item=CN10122049#tt
Two books I have obtained which might interest you (for reference purposes only, since they are just beginner’s volumes) are 1) 文言读本 (from 生活‧讀書‧新知三聯書店) and 2) 文言文练功房 (from 五南出版社). Both released only a month or two ago. The former has a splendid 30 pages on about 200 虚词, just what I was looking for!
And for my own reference, it’s PulleybLank. Sigh.
Best,
I’ll have a look at those books, thanks!
Good to hear from you, and thanks! You could have a look at this post and the comments for some suggestions on good textbooks and dictionaries.
For a book that exhaustively lists all the function words in classical Chinese, including copious examples, have a look at 古代漢語虛詞詞典, published by the Shanghai Commercial Press. If you are living in Taipei, you should be able to buy a copy at the Wanjuan bookstore close to Guting MRT. That’s where I bought mine a few months ago, anyway.
You may also want to look at Edwin Pulleyblank’s Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar for a quick introduction to the grammar of 文言文. And don’t forget 三民書局’s excellent blue 讀本 which any academic bookstore in Taiwan sells. There’s almost certain to be a modern edition of whatever you want to be reading, with bopomofo, good annotations and translations into Mandarin.
Hope to hear from you again in the comments!