argumate:

so Chinese is full of cool short phrases (chengyu) that are typically referred to as “idioms” or “proverbs” or “cliches” but are basically fucking memes, the kind of memes you get when a language is used for scholarly in-jokes for two thousand years, the kind of memes you don’t get in English because no fucking scholar worth reading ever used English!

basically Chinese could make the transition from classical to vernacular while preserving a huge helping of its memes, whereas when modern vernacular English swept away Latin, Greek, and French (sorry France) much was lost, and only pretentious tossers lucky enough to get a classical education are able to partake of the full memetic payload of Western Civilisation.

(okay even Tumblr Teens have “this is Plato’s man” and “Carthage must be destroyed” and whatever Caesar they managed to pick up from Asterix comics, but that’s still so little!)

Japanese is like this then there’s 1-2 layers of “whaaat were those Chinese guys talking about, dude?”

Plus by the time literacy gets beyond the nobility they’ve been borrowing in from Chinese every 200 years to an atonal language so everything has like 5 secondary meanings and is a pun for everything else