Post #4494479

Here is a translation note I wrote just now while working on the Annals of Yanzi, because it's informative on its own: “Three thousand servants, three girlfriends and four ministers” isn’t necessarily meant to be taken as those exact numbers, but can stand for “a few thousand, a few, several” in the same way that we say “a couple” to mean not necessarily exactly two but definitely more than one. This is because there is no grammatical singular/plural distinction in Classical Chinese, so you just throw out a keyword that gives the ballpark size and move on. They will often give a range to indicate the non-literal nature, such as saying “five, six colors” to mean “many colors.” Keep this in mind when trying to do math with numbers given in ancient sources! #classicalchinese #translation