Chinese grammar is a very big subject.
Before the May 4th
movement, the Chinese language had reached the zenith height in the writings,
without ever discussing the English-type grammar. That is, there is a Chinese grammar
of its own. Yet, after the May 4th movement, the Chinese grammar was
squeezed into the English-like grammar structure, and no one knows the true
Chinese grammar anymore today.
Yet, discussing Chinese grammar in theory is not easily understood
by even the native Chinese now. Thus, I have used ‘西廂記’ as the
source of examples to describe the Chinese sentence ‘structure’, for two
reasons.
First, it almost encompasses all types of Chinese sentences (它卻幾乎包含了 ‘漢文’ 的全部文體)。
對白 --- 白話體
詩 --- 律體
文言 --- 散體
詞 --- 詞是從詩律中, 解放出來的。不受字數限制。但仍講究音韻。
曲 ---譜成‘曲調’ 的詞
Second, it is a very short novel which has only about 50,000 words
(‘西廂’ 是一本很有趣的愛情故事。篇幅也很短, 約僅五萬字) which is only about 1/20 of the
length of ‘紅樓夢’ 。 That is, students can easily
read it over and over.
Yet, this new book “‘西廂記’:
漢語 ‘文法’ 大全 (Chinese Grammar)” teaches ‘Chinese grammar’
to those who must already be able to read the current Chinese newspaper, as
this great classic novel ‘西廂記’ is used as the example material for analyzing
the Chinese sentences. I have made the entire boob of ‘西廂記’ available
in this book. I also made some glossary explanations (註解) which
help the reader to read the novel easier.
The earlier version of the book is available at http://www.chineselanguageforums.com/chinese-idioms/topic-t2059.html
. Now, the pdf file of this book is available for the readers of this blog
(free of charge, valued at $80), as a token of appreciation for everyone’s
devotion of learning or teaching Chinese language, and it can be downloaded at http://www.chinese-word-roots.org/Chinese_grammar.pdf . The pdf
file has a larger and better-looking font than the web page can provide and has
the latest version.
