Talk:Thousand Character Classic

Full Text
The full text of the Thousand Character Classic is included here as reference from the main article.

There is a mistake in the above?
The text above contains the word 維 twice, hence there is an error somewhere? I thought there were supposed to be 1000 unique characters. There is also 傳 repeated too. --HappyCamper 20:18, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I trust that the original text were all unique. You know those ancient scholars who took pride in doing literate work very seriously.  So if they said every characters were supposed to be unique, then they should be.  Or else, many people would have pointed out the mistakes over the ages.  So I guess there are only a few ways to explain these.  There was an error in the transciption of the text.  The person who scanned or typed in the text made a mistake.  Another possible explanation is the loss of some variants of the writing when humanity stepped into the computer age.  Remember that this text was designed for calligraphy.  These 1000 unique writings did not necessary mean 1000 unique Chinese words of unique meanings.  One famous calligraphy work still popular today is the hundard fu 福 or hundard 壽 diagram where the characters are written in 100 different variations.  Many of these variants are valid characters but are omitted from the computer character sets.  For example, if you visit this Chinese dictionary online and then search for the abbreviation "var. of" and you will find hundreds of Chinese characters that are not encoded in the regular computer character set and special graphic glyphs are needed to display them.  I'll try to look up a printed version of the text later to verify if these two characters were due to computer glitches.  I wonder how you spotted the duplications.  Did you use some software tools to do it or you just have eagle's eyes.  Kowloonese 22:26, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * 傅 (fu) and 傳 (chuan) are two different characters. There was a typo in the text. I have fixed it now.


 * After some quick Googling, I found that 恭維鞠養 should have been 恭惟鞠養 which came from Confucious'《孝經》 However, many googled websites show the modern usage 恭維 (918K entries found), not the ancient usage 恭惟 (10K entries found). The change in usage of the character explains the duplication. Kowloonese 22:55, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Nope, don't have eagle eyes. I'm just a Wikipedian :-) -- having said that, this should give you a hint: Ngor see yat gor fai lok dik ho yi tong... -- I was curious to see how much I could read, and kept a list. In the end, when I looked at it, there were some duplications. I am not sure if I caught everything though. Thanks so much for looking into this, I really appreciate it! --HappyCamper 01:58, 31 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I wonder what this would become if it were converted to simplified Chinese. Half Thousand Character classic or less???  :-(  Kowloonese 22:18, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, the text is translated into Simplified Chinese and compare side by side to the original text. It is hard to tell if some characters are folded into the same writing. One observation is that only a small portion of these 1000 Chinese characters were simplified. Kowloonese 02:26, 18 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I used this website to convert from Traditional to Simplified Chinese. I don't know many Simplified words, however, I feel that the conversion is incomplete.  For example, the character 148 髮 for "hair" in 盖此身髮 was not simplified. Charcter 803 餐 in 具膳餐饭 is not simplified. Character 693 鑑 in 鑑貌辨色 doesn't have have the simplified metal radical. Character 813 饑 in 饑厌糟糠 does not have the simplied "eat" radical. Character 849 絃 and 852 讌 in 絃歌酒讌 does not have the simplified "silk" and "speech" radical respectively. Kowloonese 22:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I used another converter from Apple's MacOS X to get the simplified text. See revision history to find the difference. A few of the above characters are simplified correctly now. Not all of them were fixed though.  Kowloonese 07:42, 9 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I checked and found that 鑑(as well as 鑒) simplifies to 鉴, while 絃 simplifies to 弦. I'll amend them. I don't believe there's a simplification of 餐 unless you're referring to the now defunct Second-round simplified Chinese character(二简字) --A10203040 18:04, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

4 other characters appear twice: character_position	character	phrase 27	成	閏餘成歲 33	雲	雲騰致雨 164	潔	女慕貞潔 291	成	篤初成美 504	兵	家給千兵 598	兵	用兵最精 623	雲	禪主雲亭 836	潔	紈扇圓潔

Tommy Wong 7:00 a.m. 08 Feb 2006. Tommy Wong 23:04, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I fixed two typos, see revision history for the correct characters. The other two were not errors.  In 用軍最精, 軍 is army, not 兵 soldier.  In 禪主云亭, 云 means speak, not 雲 clouds. These two are different characters in Traditional Chinese.  Simplified Chinese borrowed the "speak" and used it as "cloud".  Don't you hate Mao for this?  Kowloonese 02:49, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 哈哈，从“Kowloon”看，应该是香港来，那就用中文回复好了：云本身是雲的象形在前，被用作说义在后；论始作俑者，简化字方案是起于民国. 甚至雲这个字未必正确，因为雨已经包含了云. --120.210.253.78 (talk) 07:59, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

HappyCamper:

Ngor see yat gor fai lok dik ho yi tong...

我是一個快樂的“ho yi tong". I am unable to guess what is “ho yi tong". Is that "好易通".

Tommy Wong 23:16, 8 February 2006 (UTC)


 * creative interpretations. I bet HappyCamper will like the praise.  The wikilink to McDull gave it away.  According to McDull, he said "Ho Yi Tong" as "very painful ears" though he really meant "good child".  According to the school song lyrics of McDull's kindergarten, then the phrase in Cantonese is "鵝是一個快烙滴好耳痛" :-) Kowloonese 02:49, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I find it. 篤初“誠”美，紈扇圓“潔–less 三點水”. So, 1000 characters have no duplications. My version of the 1000 characters have 5 mistakes (include 維惟). Now, all are corrected (assume no other mistakes). Thank you. Tommy Wong 14:57, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

My knowledge of Chinese language is vary basic, so I do not know whether or not these duplications I discovered in the above Traditional version are just my ignorance:

These four characters appear twice in the Traditional version:

叔 in 348 and 657 感 in 558 and 749 璧 in 234 and 487 義 in 378 and 562

--203.47.166.27 05:17, 30 March 2006 (UTC) (Stanley Hendoro)


 * Thank you for checking for duplicates. I copied the text here from one of the websites on the Internet.  I didn't expect it had so many typographical errors.  Fortunately, this classic is also posted in many other places and it is not difficult to google the corrections.  It would be nice if someone can run a small program to compare every character in the included text to find more duplicates.  As I pointed out early, the duplicates in the Traditional version are most likely typo errors in the copied text.  It would be interesting to see how many of these unique characters become duplicates after simplication. The duplicates should not be too many according to rough eyeballing. Kowloonese 06:20, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you Kowloonese for amending the text.

I used a spreadsheet program to list the 1,000 charcters and sorted them by the charcter to discover the above four duplicates.

I presume the changes you made were just on the four characters. I have replaced them in my spreadsheet and resorted the list to check for possible duplicates caused by the four new characters, and there was none.

--203.47.166.27 06:04, 31 March 2006 (UTC) (Stanley Hendoro)


 * Good. Can you sort the Simplified text the same way?  By eyeballing, I could see two duplicates due to the simplification.  The character 33 and 148 are folded to another character with different meaning.  Same for the new character 749.  Kowloonese 09:10, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Character 26 余 should be 餘 in traditional. See changelog 210.86.1.151 (talk) 00:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Simplified Sorted
I have sorted the Simplified version and found four (4) duplications and one (1) missing character.

The duplications are:

The missing charcter is character number 438 (traditional: 綵 cǎi). Is the simplified version of 綵 should be 彩?

Just a question: isn't it better if the poem is actually displayed on the "Article" page instead of tucked away in this "Discussion" page? I believe it used to be like that before.

That is all.

--61.88.94.242 03:44, 4 April 2006 (UTC) (Stanley Hendoro)


 * Hi, I consulted 3 different simplified chinese dictionaries, and they all point 彩 as the simplification of 綵. So I'll just insert this into the passage. --A10203040 15:01, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

The wikisource link seems to be broken. Should it be fixed or removed? 165.95.12.115 20:18, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Including the text of the poem (title added)
i added the poem to the article but it messed it up so i reverted —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.46.206.230 (talk • contribs).


 * Well, for one thing, you put it inside the infobox, and for another thing Wikipedia isn't the place for original source texts. That would be Wikisource. —Keenan Pepper 22:05, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

english translation
Does anyone know where there's an English translation online? I've been looking for one but have been unable to find it -- it would also make a great addition to the article. Frikle 03:03, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I added a link to an annotated translation found on Google (by a certain Nathan Sturman). It looks good to me, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge. Kaicarver 09:57, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

I just started an English translation line by line. This is still ongoing and it is currently at line 11 of 125. This is the link to the blog - http://lostinchinese.blogspot.com/ Changgee (talk) 08:35, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Is the 1000 Classic be broken down into sections?
In the Chinese wikitext of the 1000 Classic, it is broken down into sections. Can anyone explain how it is broken down? Is there a traditional way to divide it into sections? Additionally, Nathan Sturman's edition mentions that it has 7 sections, but he doesn't mark where they are.Jimhoward72 (talk) 14:20, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Translation in modern Japanese
There is a translation at http://homepage2.nifty.com/seifuukai/fileboard/senjkais.txt into modern Japanese. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MarB23 (talk • contribs) 11:34, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Sources on the thousand character classic
http://books.google.com/books?id=geU8MwAACAAJ&dq=1000+character+classic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4QioULuVK8_J0AGRqoHgBw&ved=0CEsQ6AEwCQ

Jerezembel (talk) 22:54, 17 November 2012 (UTC)


 * NOTE: to save others some time, I checked these "sources" and am sorry to report that they were 19th century references, not WP:Reliable Sources. ch (talk) 05:21, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

The meaning of 玄 and 黄.
The very beginning of this text is about astronomy. So 玄 and 黄 should refer to the color of the sky (天) and the land (地), respectively.

I think 玄 means "black" and 黄 means "yellow". Both use their original literal meaning. Culture is mentioned in later chapters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.203.163.103 (talk) 07:13, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

千字文
千字文釋句 By 周興嗣

增註三千字文 By 補拙居士, 姜岳

千字文

https://archive.org/details/pgcommunitytexts24184gut

https://archive.org/details/pgcommunitytexts24075gut

Rajmaan (talk) 06:28, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Inconsistent transcription
The various methods of transcription in the article are inconsistent and really don't make sense. The first paragraph is a good example of this:


 * Thousand Character Classic  is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. It contains exactly one thousand unique characters. It is said that Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (r. 502–549) commissioned 周興嗣 (pinyin: Zhou Xingsi, jyutping: Zau1 Hing3 Zi6) to compose this poem for his prince to practice calligraphy.  The original title of the poem was 《次韻王羲之書千字》 and it is sung in the same way in which children learning Latin alphabet writing do with the "alphabet song".

Instances from this paragraph of text that is transcribed or that should be are as follows:
 * 1) The Thousand Character Classic (千字文)
 * 2) 周興嗣 (pinyin: Zhou Xingsi, jyutping: Zau1 Hing3 Zi6)
 * 3) 《次韻王羲之書千字》

The first example gives an English translation followed by Hanzi characters in parenthesis with no romanization.

The second example gives in-line Hanzi characters followed by two different romanizations within parenthesis. The second of these romanizations is Jyutping, which is not one of the two romanization schemes (Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles) recommended by [Wikipedia's guidelines]. If Jyutping is to be used, there should be some justification given for it in the Talk page. (For example, if Jyutping is more appropriate because a particular individual or publication's name is more recognizable in Cantonese, this may be a valid reason for including a Jyutping romanization, but Pinyin may also be used to represent Cantonese pronunciations directly.) Furthermore, Wikipedia's guidelines recommend italicizing romanized Chinese to distinguish it from natively-Roman text, which is not done within this paragraph.

The third example gives the original title of the poem, but does not provide an English translation or romanization of any kind. If this information is to be useful to readers of an English-language article, it should at the very least include an English translation, preferably as the first in-line element, followed by the Hanzi characters within parenthesis and possibly by a romanization (one of the two recommended varieties) as well. If a translation or transcription cannot be supplied, this information may need to be removed from the article.

Finally, elsewhere in the article, Jyutping and Pinyin transcriptions are given sometimes with the Jyutping transcription first, and other times with the Pinyin transcription first. If Jyutping is to be included at all, it should likely be second to the recommended (Pinyin) transcription system, and in any case, the order of the two should be consistent throughout the article.

Andrew John Bayles (talk) 20:12, 4 April 2014 (UTC)


 * ✅ There are many pages just as in nead of attention as this one on Wikipedia. Be bold and make changes where you see fit. Rincewind42 (talk) 07:57, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Comparison and Reconciliation Against Other Versions
I have been looking for the best "version" of this poem. I found 3 versions and none of them agree. I created a comparison between the Wikipedia Traditional version above, against Cambridge and Project Gutenberg versions.

In defense of the Wikipedia version above, each character is unique. That said, I don't understand why some characters are in use in the Wikipedia version. Example character #554 seems particularly incorrect to me. I am putting this out for a review by the Wikipedia community in case a substantial error or area for improvement is found in the Wikipedia version above. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable in Chinese to determine if any of the characters in the Wikipedia version are incorrect. Perhaps somebody watching this page can give an assist?

Char. No., Project Gutenburg, Cambridge, Wikipedia, Issue 30, 召, 呂, 呂, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 48, 崗, 岡, 岡, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 64, 薑, 姜, 薑, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 66, 鹹, 咸, 鹹, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 82, 製, 制, 制, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 97, 吊, 弔, 弔, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 103, 殷, 殷, 商, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 123, 壹, 一, 壹, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 132, 樹, 竹, 竹, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 164, 絜, 絜, 潔, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 198, 贊, 讚, 讚, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 205, 剋, 克, 克, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 234, 辟, 璧, 璧, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 241, 資, 資, 資, Project G. duplicates "資", 241 & 654, differs from Cambridge/Wiki 264, 清, 凊, 清, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 301, 籍, 藉, 籍, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 360, 枝, 根, 枝, Cambridge duplicates "根", 360 & 770, differs from Project G./Wiki 395, 誌, 志, 志, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 428, 鬱, 郁, 鬱, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 438, 彩, 彩, 綵, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 457, 升, 升, 陞, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 483, 鐘, 鍾, 鐘, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 524, 實, 實, 實, Project G. duplicates "實", 524 & 567 554, 迴, 回, 迥, All 3 versions are mismatched 558, 感, 感, 感, Project G. duplicates "感", 558 & 749 567, 實, 寔, 寔, Project G. duplicates "實", 524 & 567, differs from Cambridge/Wiki 617, 嶽, 岳, 嶽, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 619, 琠, 泰, 泰, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 620, 岐, 岱, 岱, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 621, I, 禪, 禪, Project G. differs from Cambridge/Wiki 645, 岩, 岩, 巖, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 654, 資, 茲, 茲, Project G. duplicates "資", 241 & 654, differs from Cambridge/Wiki 662, 藝, 藝, 蓺, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 693, 鑒, 鑒, 鑑, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 703, 祗, 祗, 祇, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 749, 感, 慼, 慼, Project G. duplicates "感", 558 & 749, differs from Cambridge/Wiki 767, 早, 蚤, 早, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 770, 根, 根, 根, Cambridge duplicates "根", 360 & 770 776, 颯, 搖, 颻, All 3 versions are mismatched 778, 鯤, 鵾, 鯤, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 787, 玩, 玩, 翫, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 813, 饑, 飢, 饑, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 827, 績, 績, 織, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 829, 侍, 待, 侍, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 836, 潔, 潔, 絜, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 849, 弦, 弦, 絃, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 852, 宴, 宴, 讌, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 871, 烝, 烝, 蒸, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 881, 箋, 箋, 牋, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 915, 僚, 僚, 遼, Wikipedia differs from Project G./Cambridge 933, 並, 竝, 並, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 953, 璇, 璿, 璇, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki 980, 莊, 庄, 莊, Cambridge differs Project G./Wiki

Revmachine21 (talk) 02:10, 1 April 2016 (UTC)