[fiblye]

How did geography have an effect here? I don't see what you mean.

And China hasn't really had too much stability. It's always been full of revolutions, competing empires, dynastic changes, warring states, shifts in power, changes in ethnic ruling class, and so on. Go through a list of deadliest wars and revolutions and a good chunk of them are in what is today China.

[dredmorbius]

China has been a largely continuous political entity for about 8,000 years.

It's been invaded at least in part a few times (Mongols, 13th c., English, 18th c., and Japanese, 20th c., most especially), but retained its overall identity and either assimilated (Mongols) or repelled (English, Japanese) the invaders, eventually.

Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication of local culture or tribes multiple times, going to prehistoric times, to the present (past century certainly, past few decades quite arguably). There have been very few constant borders or identities, certainly not on the scale of China.

Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign:

Hwæt,ic swefna cyst secgan wylle, hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte siþþan reordberend reste wunedon.

("Behold, I wish to tell the best of dreams which I dreamt at the middle of the night, after speakers remained in rest." https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM)

[chrisco255]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:T...

Watch that graphic to see the evolution of the extent of "China" since the Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC. It occupies a fraction of the current extent of China. So there were lots of wars, and lots of revolutions before modern Chinese borders were established.

I get that Chinese have had more cultural and language cohesion, but that's at least partially because certain dynasties and regions won over these other regions in large swaths and history is written by the winners.

[dredmorbius]

And a nearly comparable (and orchestrated!) time-lapse evolutionary map of Europe, though extending back to only 400 BCE:

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI

Note that China was under a largely single and unified set of linguistic, cultural, and political organisation throughout the entire 3,000 year period you depict. The "modern" map of Europe has changed dramatically just in the past 30 years, let alone the past 100 - 200. Entire linguistic and cultural tribes have completely vanished, save for a few pitiful relic remains. Political continuity has been nil (Greece, Macedonia, Byzantine Empire, Rome, Moorish Spain, the Gauls, Britons, Celts, and Germanic tribes, the Rus? (Swedish invaders, BTW), Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires? Soviet Bloc? Independent Baltic and Balkan states? Ireland, under English subjugation since 1601, the north to this day. Poland as the pinball kid of Prussia, Russia, and Germany.

That's Europe.

Addenda: The extreme extents of the Chinese empire varied greatly. The bulk of the population, then as now, was in the eastern coastal region, largely the Yellow and Yangze river floodplains.

[chrisco255]

Oh, sure, I'm not arguing that Europe was less tumultuous than China. There were many, many schisms, and wars however. Had some of these civil wars or invasions from Mongolia, Japan, etc within China had gone a different way, they could have ended up as fractured as ancient Rome.

Here's a few hundred wars that occurred during the past couple millennia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battl...

[dredmorbius]

Quantitative assessment's a poor qualitative metric at best, and I've not done a tally, but conflict's not been unknown in Europe either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe

[chrisco255]

I'm not disputing that. I'm arguing that China's history hasn't been some "straight line" since 4000 B.C. It's been a very rocky road.

[fiblye]

>Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication of local culture or tribes multiple times, going to prehistoric times, to the present (past century certainly, past few decades quite arguably). There have been very few constant borders or identities, certainly not on the scale of China.

Except you wouldn't contrast that. Those same events have happened in the region of China on the same scale as continental Europe as a whole. Entire societies have risen, conquered lands, and vanished.

The Manchu are the most notable example for coming in from the Northeast and conquering China. They had their own unique culture and language. Native speakers of their language are now countable on one hand.

The Tangut are another interesting example. They had a very unique culture and writing system unlike anything else and had their own empire in the middle of China. They were wiped out/eventually absorbed by Mongols and were completely forgotten for centuries until their writings were recently rediscovered.

Written Chinese today is an evolution of only one of the many, many cultures that formed what China is today. Even Japanese people can read classic Chinese texts with just a little practice, but they're definitely a separate society and always have been.

You could also argue western European cultures are all just Rome since they retain parts of the Latin language and writing system and can make out some words if they squint enough.

[yongjik]

> Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns ....

That's largely because Chinese characters themselves didn't change, even though the underlying sound and grammar changed. In your English example, imagine "ic" is written as "I", "nihte" as "night", and so on, so that every word is written as the modern spelling of its descendant word. It will be much easier to guess its meaning.

[dredmorbius]

True, and an interesting contrast in properties of Western alphabets vs. Eastern logosyllabic writing.

Advantage West: a compact, typeset- and keyboard-friendly characterset with a writing style that generally allows sounding out of unknown words.

Advantage East: a pronunciation-independent mapping of ideas allowing mutually unintelligible spoken language across either space (Japan, to some extent Korea, as well as modern Chinese provinces, particularly Mandarin vs. Cantonese) or time (modern vs. ancient) to at least largely understand one another.

Much of the shift in written English parallels changes in spoken English. Chinese doens't have that problem. But it's far harder to learn and type or encode in modern computers, where it is not letterforms but encodings standing for letterforms which are stored and projected via fonts and Unicode codepoints.

Chinese, as a tonal language is so dependent on inflection that my own primitive attempts to pronounce even simple phrases are not understood based on my incorrect tonality.

Contrast with various Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), which vary greatly in pronunciation and orthography. German is spelled and spoken logically. Danish is spelled much like German but not pronounced the same. Norwegian pronunciation differs, but its spelling at least corresponds to that pronunciation. Swedish is pronounced very differently, and the spelling doesn't much conform.

All share common linguistic roots.

Each approach of writing and alphabet appears to be brittle in its own ways.

[windoze]

I would say the south eastern part of china has been relatively recognizable borders for a long time. Modern china is the result of Qing expansion around the 1650s. Take a look at the historical map by year - it's really amazing how quickly things changed at the turn of the century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWqVzZnwnOk

[mdemare]

That text is over 1000 years old.

This is Shakespeare, from 1599:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Hardly foreign

[dredmorbius]

I'm given to understand (as I neither speak nor read Chinese) that a fairly typical high-school or college educated modern Chinese can at least read some Confucious (551-479 BCE). There is no comparable English-language case as 1) Old English didn't exist until the 5th century -- the Britons of Roman time (43 CE) were Celts and spoke Celtic, 2) The Latin alphabet hadn't been imported, and 3) literary tradition was slight -- largely oral.

Even taking the tack of following Germanic Anglo-Saxon culture buys you little -- spoken and written language would be unintelligible.

A Western college graduate of ancient languages today might understand Latin, which could get you to 240 BCE, or possibly, with a different alphabet, Greek, whose earliest writings, the Illiad and the Odyssey, date to the 6th century BCE in written form. But that's not a common skill.

Greek and Latin had been taught, as part of the high school curriculum, through the 1940s or 50s, but not generally any longer. Keep in mind that high school graduation rates in 1900 in the US were about 6%, lower than Ph.D. attainment rates today.

[yesenadam]

That's a modernised version! Because the original isn't easy to read, I guess. Punctuation, spelling, letterforms, the alphabet, have all changed since then. Pronunciation too. The original is something like this ('f' is the closest I can get to the old 's'):

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears:

I come to bury Cæfar, not to praife him:

The euill that men do, liues after them,

The good is oft enterred with their bones,

So let it be with Cæfar. The Noble Brutus,

Hath told you Cæfar was Ambitious:

If it were fo, it was a greeuous Fault,

And greeuoufly hath Cæfar anfwer'd it.

Heere, vnder leaue of Brutus, and the reft ...

https://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/image/74391696-b1e6-4b56...

https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/JC_F1/page/13/

[mjw1007]

I think these days it should be OK to assume that people's browsers will render a long s directly: « praiſe ».

[torben-friis]

> Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign:

You're pretty much equating English and Europe when talking about language, which in this case is very wrong. I, as a spaniard, can read poetry from a thousand years ago perfectly fine, and we do indeed do it in school.

[dredmorbius]

In 1000 CE, the principle language of Spain was Arabic.

Though Spanish, Castillian, etc., were spoken. Well, back until 210 CE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_languag...

[torben-friis]

Spanish (or the dozens of romance languages and dialects that would eventually converge to it, anyway) predated Arabic in the peninsula, and survived it. As a consequence, we study arabic presence as an invasion/influence that came and left, rather than "what our culture was" at the time - whether that's fair or not is an entirely different topic, but the point is that I can perfectly read the literature made in romance languages since it hasn't changed that much. Even latin would be somewhat understandable.

[sk5t]

> English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign

Are you suggesting this text is from the 17th century? I'm no expert but this much Germanic influence seems much older.

[ithkuil]

Indeed it's much older:

"The poem is recorded in its fullest form in the Vercelli Book, a late-tenth-century West Saxon manuscript which was left in Northern Italy in Anglo-Saxon times. Vercelli is on the road to Rome; the manuscript was either abandoned or forgotten by a pious Anglo-Saxon pilgrim. An Old Northumbrian version of part of the poem also appears, carved in runic script, on the late-seventh-/early-eighth-century"

Source: https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM

[bigfudge]

It’s Anglo Saxon, which much older. With a bit of effort a modern speaker can read Chaucer which is about 1300

[dredmorbius]

I'm suggesting it's 1) English and 2) more than 400 years old.