Why can Chinese people read Chinese texts up to 2,000 years old while English-speakers can only read English texts up to 500 years old?

为什么中国人可以读懂2000年前的中文书籍，而英语使用者只能读懂500年前的英语书籍？

以下是Quora网友的评论：

Michał Pietrusiński

Because the writing systems are constructed around different philosophies, although it is just as huge an overstatement to say that an English speaker can access 500 year old texts, as it is to say that a Chinese speaker readily understands the texts written 2,000 years ago. The older the texts, the less accessible will its content be, regardless of the writing system, as people, cultures, fashions and customs change and there is always a need to write something new about something new in a new way.

因为不同的文字系统是围绕不同的哲学理念构建的，说英语的人可以读懂500年前的书籍，就像说说汉语的人可以轻松读懂2000年前的书籍一样，这都是夸大其词。无论是哪种文字系统，文字越古老，内容就越晦涩难解，因为人、文化、潮流和习俗都会发生变化，各时期的人都需要用新的方式记录一些新的内容。

Yugan Talovich

Chinese who can read standard (traditional) characters can read texts 2,000 years old because the characters have remained constant. With simplified characters it’s probably more difficult.

能阅读标准汉字(繁体字)的中国人能读懂2000年前的文字，因为汉字一直保持不变。简体字出现后可能就比较困难了。

To read earlier texts, you read Classical Chinese, not modern spoken Mandarin. It can be a little difficult, but not overly difficult if you slow down and think about what the words mean. I have walked elementary school students here in Taiwan through such works as 桃花源記 (the Plum Blossom Spring, written about 420 ce) and 司馬豹治鄴 (a wonderful story about fighting superstition, from about 500 bce). I have the kids read through them and explain to me what they say; if they get stuck, I hint. Reasonably bright elementary school kids can figure out such essays. I have even taken elementary school children through bronze inscriptions; I have to choose the inscriptions and give them more hints about the characters, and some characters I have to explain outright, but we have read inscriptions dating back to about 1000 bce, and have even done some easy oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty, say 1200 bce.

阅读早期的文章，你读的是文言文，而不是现代的普通话口语。这可能会有点难度，但如果你读慢一点，思考文字的意思，也不是太难。我带着台湾的小学生们阅读桃花源记(公元420年)和司马豹治邺(公元前500年一则反对迷信的精彩故事)等作品。我让孩子们通读文章，向我解释文章内容；如果他们遇到困难，我就给点暗示。聪明的小学生都能读懂这类文章。我甚至带小学生阅读铜铭文；我必须筛选一下铭文内容，为他们提供字词的提示，有些字我必须直接解释，但我们读懂了大约公元前1000年的铭文，甚至还读过公元前1200年一些简单的商朝甲骨文铭文。

Once when I was in a museum, I noticed that a little boy maybe ten years old was reading the inscription on the back of a statue of the Buddha with no difficulty. It was pretty easy, just names, dates, and some nice ideas about Buddha, but the statue dated to around 300 ce. I think that continuity is pretty impressive.

This is one of the reasons I am so fascinated by Chinese writing.

有一次我在博物馆，我发现一个十岁左右的小男孩毫不费力地阅读一尊佛像背后的铭文。那篇铭文很简单，只有名字、日期和佛陀的一些优秀思想，但这尊雕像可以追溯到公元300年左右。我认为这种文化的连贯性令人赞叹。

这是让我为中国文学深深着迷的原因之一。

But English is my native language, and I taught English for TOEFL, GRE, and GMAT for decades. I read Shakespeare only with difficulty, because he wrote for the people speaking 400 years ago, and speech changes very quickly. I love Macbeth, but have trouble with some of the passages.

但是英语是我的母语，我教授托福、GRE和GMAT的英语已经有几十年时间了。我读莎士比亚觉得吃力，因为这是他为400年前的人的口头表达而创作的作品，而口语的变化速度非常快。我喜欢《麦克白》，但对其中的一些段落不太理解。

Ethelbert Reitheriences

Chinese or Chonorese is pictographic/ideogrammic script, which never changes its meaning, no matter how much time passes. We can even read things as old as 25000 BCE. As long as the exact pictogram or linear script is drawn, the meaning is the same. Whereas alphabetic scripts like Roman alphabet for English, have to change with evolving pronunciation. Pronunciation may vary with space, like Scots and other English dialects, but they also vary with time, modern American/modern standard English is very different from the pronunciation and rustic vocabulary of Shakespeare and Chaucer. For instance, words like electricity/electronic, aircraft, computers and robotics are strictly modern, unknown in the times not only of Shakespeare but someone as late as Wordsworth and Keats. Whereas electricity was known in ancient China/Choncor/Chongkok/Tiongkok in the form of lightning and magnetic compasses, so by adding an electrical sign, or 电 modern meanings can be created in Chonorese as in diannao or electronic brain to mean computer.

汉语是象形/表意文字，无论时间如何流逝，它的意思都不会改变。我们甚至可以读懂公元前25000年的书籍。只要我们画出准确的象形文字或线形文字，意思就都是一样的。而英语采用了拉丁字母等字母体系，会随着发音的演变而变化。语言的发音可能会随着地理范围而变化，就像苏格兰和其他英语方言一样，还会随着时间而变化，现代美国/现代标准英语与莎士比亚和乔叟时期的发音以及乡村方言词汇都有着很大的不同。例如，像“电力/电子”、“飞机”、“计算机”和“机器人”这些词都是严格意义上的现代词汇，不仅在莎士比亚时代不为人知，在华兹华斯和济慈的时代也同样不为人知。古代中国，人们通过闪电和罗盘的形式知道了“电”，所以加一个“电”，比如电脑，字面意思是电子大脑，也就是计算机。

Douglas Black

English as a language didn’t exst 2000 years ago.

The languages in Great Britain and Ireland at that time would have been Brittonic which became Welsh (and a few others), Pictish and ancient Irish, all of which are to put it mildly a tad difficult. Add into that Latin from the Romans.

Anywhere else English is established nowadays would have used local indigenous languages such as in North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

英语作为一种语言，在两千年前都还没出现呢。

当时大不列颠和爱尔兰使用的语言是布立吞语，后来演变成了威尔士语(以及其他一些语言)，皮克特语和古爱尔兰语，这些语言都是有些难度的。再加上罗马人使用的拉丁语。

如今使用英语的其他国家，本来使用的都是当地的土著语言，如北美、撒哈拉以南非洲、澳大利亚和新西兰。

English has changed considerably since the first Jutes, Saxons and Angles came to what became England and created it. Only after the addition of French would it be considered understandable to modern audiences but even then words die out or their meanings change and new ones come in.

Chinese characters will be more or less the same ones from 2000 years ago but like all the Chinese languages would be pronounced differently.

自从第一批朱特人、撒克逊人和盎格鲁人来到后来的英格兰地区并建立了英格兰，英语开始发生了巨大的变化。在融合了部分法语之后，现代使用者才开始读懂古英语，但即使这样，部分单词会消失，含义会变化，也会出现新的单词。

而汉字的字形和2000年前依然基本一致，不过发音也同样会发生改变。

Susan Lopez

The sounds of words (e.g., typical of English spelling efforts) are subject to more rapid change, than are the semantic representations of Chinese (characters that are mostly meaning-based). The sounds of English have and will change a lot over time.

字词的发音（例如英语的拼写）比汉语的语义（主要是基于意义的字符）变化更快。随着时间的推移，英语的发音已经发生了很大的变化，以后还会继续变化。

司馬 刑

I found a table using the Swadesh list as a reference to compare the differences between ancient and modern Chinese. It can be seen that in more than 80% of Chinese, ancient and modern have the same meaning or similar meanings.

我找到了一个表格，以斯瓦迪士核心词列表为参考来对比古代汉语和现代汉语的差异。可以看出，汉语中有80%以上字词的古今意义相同或相近。

Since Chinese is an ideographic character, not a phonetic character, even if the tone changes, the meaning of the characters is still the same or similar. Since the Qin Dynasty (221 BC) in China unified writing, most characters have fixed appearance and meaning

因为汉字是表意文字，不是音标文字，所以就算声调发生变化，汉字的意思仍然相同或相似。自秦朝(公元前221年)中国统一文字以来，大多数汉字都有固定的字形和含义。

This allows users of Chinese characters to easily disassemble and combine various Chinese characters, and ensure that the meaning will not deviate too far.

这使得汉字使用者可以方便地对各种汉字进行拆解和组合，词义不会有太大的偏差。

Paul Wang

I am a native Chinese speaker with more than 20 years of academic education in China. If there were anyone said that he or she reads classical-style Chinese text up to 2,000 years old, then they do not do better than me. But the fact is that what I read is actually the explanation of the old books by some people who are about 20 to 60 years older than me, such as my parents and my teachers. This is quite similar to that I can read German and Russian if someone translated it into modern Chinese. To my knowledge, most of the Chinese characters from the old times are no longer used in today’s communications. Even the professionals need to GUESS the meaning of the mystery symbols. After their digest, the students recite their explanation and pretend they can understand the text from 2,000 years ago. That’s it.

我的母语是汉语，在中国接受了20多年的学校教育。如果有人说他或她能读懂2000年前的古文，那么他们和我的水平差不多。但事实是，我读的其实是一些比我大20到60岁的人对古文的解释，比如我的父母和老师。这就好比如果有人把德语和俄语书籍翻译成现代汉语，我也能读懂德语和俄语了。据我所知，大多数古汉字在今天的日常生活中已经不再使用了。就连专业人士也需要猜测这些神秘文字的含义。他们对古汉语做出注释，学生们背诵他们的解释，假装自己也能读懂2000年前的书籍了。事实就是这么个事实。

Cult of Linguists

Why can Chinese people read Chinese texts up to 2,000 years old while English-speakers can only read English texts up to 500 years old?

The difference in writing systems.

为什么中国人可以读懂2000年前的中文书籍，而英语使用者只能读懂500年前的英语书籍呢？

这是文字体系的差异造成的。

Chinese has been written using a logographic system for almost 3,500 years; this system is entirely agnostic about how the words encoded are to be pronounced, so much so that languages unrelated to the Chinese family also use it. Thus, a person familiar with the writing system can read texts in whatever language they choose. Minimal grammatical information is required.

中文文字系统的存在已有近3500年的历史了；这个文字系统不考虑发音的问题，所以有些中文之外的语言也会使用汉字。所以，熟悉汉字体系的人就能读懂文章内容，对语法的要求也很低。

English, on the other hand, is written in a way which very much encodes both pronunciation and grammar. This fact combines with the fact that languages change over time, so that texts from more than 500 years ago appear to the uninitiated as though they were written in a different language.

另一方面，英语的文字体系在很大程度上跟发音和语法相关。这一事实加上语言随时间而变化的事实，导致了500多年前的古英语在外行看来似乎完全是另一种语言。

Cult of Linguists

This is another commonly held misconception.

这又是一个常见的误解。

Contemporary Chinese speakers can't read Old Chinese; it was a completely different language. The grammar is different, and the uses and meanings of enough words (and characters) have changed enough that you get an effect that you'd get if an English speaker tried to read French: A lot of the elements sort of look familiar, but you have no idea what the text says (except fixed expressions still in use and the occasional fortuitous correspondence.

当代中国人读不懂古代汉语；这是一种完全不同的语言。语法不同，许多字词的用法和含义都发生了巨大的变化，你会觉得这就好比一个说英语的人读法语一样：看着好像都很眼熟，但你不知道文章讲了什么。

When you see “HORS SERVICE” written on a sign in French, you may be tempted to bring your steed in for a quick tune-up, but, if you do, any French people present will blow a puff of Gitanes smoke in your face and say, “Non, non, non.”

当你看到用法语写着“HORS SERVICE”的牌子时，你可能会忍不住把马牵过来，但如果你真的这样做，所有法国人都会朝你脸上喷口烟，高呼：“不，不，不。”

Jiaquan Huo

99.99% of Chinese cannot read this piece of 2000 year old text.

99.99%的中国人是读不懂2000年前的文字的。

I personally can only pick up a few characters and phrases.

我自己只能认出几个字和词组。

DoveofPeace

Chinese culture is ancient. It is 5 thousand years old. That is why speakers of European Latin-based languages have trouble with learning very ancient characters.

中国文化非常古老，已有五千年的历史了。这就是欧洲以拉丁语为基础的语言使用者在学习古代字母时觉得困难重重的原因。

Nicholas Stanway

Not all Chinese.

Remember that in the PRC everyone learns the simplified 20th century version of Chinese and would struggle with traditional characters, there are also old characters that people who read traditional characters would struggle with because they aren't in general use.

不是所有的中国人都能读懂。

请记住，在中国，每个人都会学习20世纪的简体中文，觉得繁体字不好认。还有一些古汉字，是连看得懂繁体字的人也觉得不好认的，因为这些古汉字使用率太低了。