Lately I’ve been translating a lot of classical Chinese. For some reason I was watching the Tom Cruise Scientology video today and it suddenly hit me that reading classical Chinese can feel a lot like listening to a Scientologist talk. They use everyday words, but give them slightly different meanings, so if you don’t know what they mean it doesn’t make any sense. Likewise, classical Chinese uses characters we’re familiar with, but they have meanings that are foreign to us, especially among the different philosophers. In Chinese we’ll have things like “humaneness” and “righteousness”, and Scientology also throws -ness on the back of everything (Wikipedia and Understanding Scientology). Modern Chinese also does this with throwing -ist (主义) on the back of everything, and a lot of PRC bureaucrat-talk can sound like this too, using set phrases and terms.
The second link above lists some categories of Scientology terminology, and says “one could probably exist for ten years in Scientology without ever using an adverb or adjective.” Classical Chinese isn’t that extreme, but it can seem that way sometime.
Then there is the category of changing verbs into nouns. In Classical Chinese just about any word can be used in any part of speech, so it’s a little more versatile here as well.
Scientology has a lot of acronyms and abbreviations. Classical Chinese is already like one giant acronym, but otherwise there’s not much comparison here. The closest thing might be in the use of naming. Everyone had like three or four names that were used in different situations like a code. Emperors had all sorts of names. And every dynasty had different official titles that could be abbreviations for longer names.
Scientology creates new words by combining two existing English words like “comm line.” This is basically how new two-character Chinese words were formed, and you might know what each mean, but when put together they have new significance. For example Xunzi uses 情性, which is sometimes translated as “essential nature,” while each character separately means “emotion” and “nature.”
Finally, like I mentioned already, Scientology takes existing English words and gives them new meanings, like “auditor.” It’s my guess that in classical Chinese those special terms like 气 and 仁 already had religious or philosophical significance, but who knows, maybe they were given that significance by the philosophers.
Sometimes I wonder if how the Chinese philosophers wrote was actually how people talked, or if they sounded to regular folks like Scientologist talk does to us. But once you’ve got the code down, it’s a lot easier to figure out what the heck they’re talking about. I have a feeling that everyone knew how to read those particular classical Chinese terms back in the day, because they are all arguing over the same terms, even if they are in different schools of thought or religious sects, whereas Scientology terms are pretty much limited to use by Scientology members.
Then Buddhism came to China and messed everything up by introducing a whole new set of terms, but that’s a different story.
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