#did I guiltily go back and add screenshots just to break up the text? maybe

[hunxi-guilai]

all right guys, let’s have a conversation about linguistic register, Lan Wangji, and I guess Wei Wuxian can come too

(and I do genuinely mean conversation, I’d love to hear other people’s input on this, because I did just write a long-ass post about the subjectivity of interpretation in translations)

So when I started interacting with the fandom and reading people’s fics, I got really confused by the way some folks were writing dialogue for Lan Wangji; he often sounded super awkward, spoke in fragments, and sometimes exclusively in third person. To be fair, all of those are elements of his speech at various times, but like, seeing it in English-language material felt like a really heavy-handed way of rendering it in translation?

I guess when you use third person within the first three episodes of the show, it makes a pretty big impression on the audience

This is not at all intended to be a criticism of people who are 1000% writing and creating wonderful work, which is more than I can say for myself, but I want to poke and prod and tease at some linguistic nuance here.

Take a deep breath, grab a pot of tea (this’ll take more than a cup), because we’re going to take the scenic route on this one--

First, a few notes on the Chinese language:

(blanket disclaimer that I’m not a linguist, nor have I studied this from a historical linguistics perspective, nor do I consider myself an expert in the language. I can call a taxi and charm parents over tea and muddle my way through a few centuries of classical texts, but I do not consider myself remotely close to native speaker-levels of fluency. I’d give myself a solid ‘proficient’ grading rather than ‘expertise,’ for D&D folks out there.

I am, however, very enthusiastic, and an accredited institution of secondary education gave me a degree in this field, so maybe that counts for something)

1) like a lot of languages, there’s a noticeable difference between the written and the vernacular language. We write our thoughts with a certain academic cadence for our essays and thinkpieces -- in complete sentences, with parallelism and craft. We speak our thoughts out loud in chaotic tumbles, often discarding the the first part of a sentence in favor of another, or stalling for thinking time with additional words that make no semantic sense (‘like,’ ‘so,’ ‘well’). Likewise in Chinese -- there’s 口语 kouyu, the vernacular, and 书面语 shumianyu, literally book-language (i.e. intended for printing/writing/visual consumption). 书面语 shumianyu Chinese tends to be much more elegant and streamlined; you'd buff up the vocabulary and slim down the fluff. It’s all very Hemingway, really.

(quick note: I’ll be using 书面语 shumianyu from here on out to refer to both elevated written language and elevated speaking language; think how you’d speak while presenting at a conference as opposed to with your friends. That higher conference register will probably be what I’m gesturing at when I refer to 书面语 shumianyu later on in this post, even though as a term it technically only refers to written stuff)

The important thing to note here is that, in the process of cutting out unnecessary/colloquial language to move from 口语 kouyu to 书面语 shumianyu, you’re not losing sentence-level intelligibility. Sure, there are less words; sometimes you’ll take out the entire subject of the sentence and leave it to be assumed. This is no way means that you’re speaking in fragments. Grammatically, you’re still golden.

Here’s an exchange from the show that highlights this pretty well:

Wei Wuxian：你这腿... 真的没问题啊。nizhetui... zhendemeiwenti-a / This leg of yours...there’s really no problem?

Lan Wangji：无事 wushi / No problem.

The literal, semantic breakdown of Lan Wangji’s response is 无 wu / ‘nothing,’ ‘a lack of,’ and 事 shi / ‘affair,’ ‘incident.’ He’s saying “there is no problem.” A fuller, more colloquial response might have been 我的腿无事 wodetuiwushi / there is no problem with my leg but Chinese grammar says he can skip the subject (his leg) and go straight to 无事 wushi. It’s not a sentence fragment; it’s just a very short sentence with omitted parts.

(it’s worth noting that he uses 无 wu, which is an older/more literary version of 没 mei, which Wei Wuxian uses. We’ll see this again -- Lan Wangji is eternally on a higher plane of existence linguistic register)

2) 文言文 wenyanwen / classical/literary Chinese is related to but distinct from modern Mandarin (the distinction is usually drawn between 文言 wenyan and 白话 baihua, which you could conceivably as “literary words” and “plain speak”). Modern Mandarin Chinese as we know and learn it today in classrooms is something that didn’t really get codified until the 20th century, for a large variety of reasons I’m just going to skim over with:

modernization and colonialism blah blah Lu Xun blah blah Westernization of grammar and the whole simplified vs. traditional debacle blah blah

The relationship between modern Mandarin and classical/literary Chinese is vaguely comparable with the relationship between modern English and older forms of English, depending on how far back you go. If you’re a fluent Mandarin speaker and you’re reading back to, say, the Ming Dynasty, you’re probably hitting Shakespearean levels of difficulty. You’ll want to keep commentaries close at hand, but you can parse it with some time and effort.

If you’re a fluent Mandarin speaker and you’re reading back to, say, the Han Dynasty, this is where the texts start at Chaucer levels of difficulty and only get harder from there. One thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that literary/classical Chinese has a completely different grammar system from modern Mandarin, and there are times when you can actively read the wrong meaning into a sentence even if you’re fluent in modern Mandarin, because classical grammar is out to get you straight-up different.

I’m not going to rant about classical Chinese grammar right now but boy howdy the things I could tell you

the tl;dr of classical Chinese can be summed up, like most things in Chinese, with a four-character idiom: 言简意赅 yanjianyigai. Broken down, we get:

言 yan - words, speech

简 jian - simple, brief

意 yi - meaning, intent

赅 gai - complete, full, comprehensive

So you put that together and you get something along the lines of “brief words, full meaning” to describe the sheer efficiency of literary/classical Chinese. When you think about the fact that the Chinese written language originated as carvings on turtle shells and bamboo strips, you can see why ancient scholars were highly motivated to keep things concise.

2a) another important disclaimer is that we don’t think people in pre-modern China necessarily spoke in 文言 wenyan literary/classical -- in fact, we’re pretty confident that 文言 wenyan was the elite (and elitist) 书面语 shumianyu book-language to a more widely-used vernacular (which we have little-to-no record of, because, well, it was vernacular. Spoken, not written).

(I swear I’m getting back to Lan Wangji. Eventually)

3) the Chinese language also has a Thing for four-character phrases. I actually have no idea why. But especially in 书面语 shumianyu, if you can wrangle a concept into four characters, that’s good shit. That’s some good writing right there. 

(This might have something to do with the fact that the vast majority of poems/songs in the 《诗经》Shijing / Classic of Odes have four-character lines. Or maybe because it’s the perfect combination of two binomes. Or maybe it’s just a neat syllabic unit. Truly, I’ve got nothing on this.)

A lot of the time, this tendency gets codified into 成语 chengyu / idioms, which are the bane of my Chinese learning experience established four-character phrases that everyone just...knows? Magically? Sometimes, they’ll have little fables/stories that accompany them, like 自相矛盾 zixiangmaodun (lit., ‘pitting a sword and shield against each other,’ deriving from a story about a Chu merchant who boasted that he had a ‘spear that could pierce any shield’ and a ‘shield that could block any spear,’ so a sassy passerby was like ‘what if you pit your Unstoppable Spear against your Impenetrable Shield’ and to this day 矛盾 maodun / lit. ‘spear and shield’ is the binome you’d use for the word ‘contradiction’). Other times, they’ll just be descriptive and pithy, like 五颜六色 wuyanliuse (lit., “five colors and six hues,” used to describe something extremely colorful, regardless of numerical reality) or 雨后春笋 yuhouchunsun (lit., “bamboo shoots after spring rain,” used to describe the rapid growth of something).

This isn’t to say that all literary texts are written exclusively in four-character phrases; other beloved line lengths include three-character lines, five-character lines, six-character lines, and seven-character lines, but four-character lines are special.

(If you guys are interested in more about this, the Wikipedia page on 成语 chengyu does a pretty solid break-down of four-character idioms/phrases)

4) for a show like 《陈情令》Chenqingling / The Untamed with an undefined, vaguely archaic time period, the dialogue given to the characters runs all over the place, from exceedingly modern and colloquial to referencing the two oldest poetry collections in the written tradition (actually though) and back. Characters will often kick their language into a higher register of speech to match the formality of a social situation. Wei Wuxian, in particular, has a knack for language; he’s usually exquisitely informal, but tends towards more formal language when he’s making declarations of intent. And sometimes he quotes Tang Dynasty poetry when he’s drunk. It’s really a crapshoot with this one.

I screamed a little when he quoted this poem, it’s a delight. Maybe one day I’ll write a way too long post about poetry in《陈情令》too but not tonight

All righty, to recap:

1) there are multiple registers of language, moving from the informal vernacular through the more formal written (and spoken) form and occasionally hopping up/sideways into literary/classical 

2) the higher you go in linguistic registers, the more dense and concise the language becomes. You are allowed to leave out entire subjects of sentences without making any grammar-level errors

3) the Chinese language has a Thing for four-character phrases

great, now let’s talk about Lan Wangji

(whew, finally)

Remember how I said that, the more formal you go in Chinese, the more language is slimmed down and the less characters are used?

Right. That’s Lan Wangji, but like, all the time.

It’s not that he talks in sentence fragments -- he’s just constantly speaking in a higher register.

Remember in episode 5, when Lan Qiren is grilling Wei Wuxian about a hypothetical haunting case with the unburied executioner, and Lan Wangji gives a textbook-perfect answer which might be his longest speech in the entire show rip? 

That’s it. It’s literally textbook perfect. Just take a look at his lines:

方法有三：度化第一, 镇压第二，灭绝第三。先以 父母妻儿 感之念之，了其 生前所愿，化去执念。不灵，则镇压。罪大恶极，怨气不散 则 斩草除根，不容其存。玄门行事 当 谨遵次序，不得有误。 

Lan Wangji is toeing the line between 书面语 shumianyu and full-on Classical Chinese here (he’s just missing a few 之乎者也 particles, and he’s there). If there’s a subject he could leave out, he did. If there was a four-character combination he could arrange in these lines, he did. 

You don’t need to be able to read Chinese to just look at the sheer number of four-character phrases he’s got going for himself (I tried to put spaces between the phrases and the transitional characters he’ll occasionally deign to use). He literally sounds like a textbook. If I came across this passage in a pre-Han Dynasty text, I would not be surprised.

(considering that, in ye olde days, the way you learned how to read and write literary Chinese was just by reading and memorizing a truckton of classic texts and absorbing the language through general osmosis, this actually puts  Lan Xichen’s comment to Lan Wangji it’s time for you to make some friends in a pretty interesting light. Smol bb Lan Wangji probably spent a great deal more time with books rather than playing outside, so it totally checks out that he’d talk like a book.)

(side note: this method of learning literary Chinese in ye olde days is precisely why the grammar would shift over centuries, which is why ancient 文言 wenyan is different from medieval 文言 wenyan is different from late-imperial 文言 wenyan, and one of the reasons why I’m afraid to read past 250 CE -- the grammar has literally changed when I wasn’t looking, which, to be frank, is very rude)

Actually, do you know what’s a cool scene where Lan Wangji unequivocally shifts into literary/classical Chinese?

we love episode 42 for many reasons, and this scene is one of them

When Jin Guangyao gloats about unmasking Wei Wuxian on the steps of Koi Tower, he loudly proclaims that the devious ways of the Yiling Patriarch deceived even the noble Hanguang-jun. Wei Wuxian laughs softly and says 不错 bucuo / correct. 

Lan Wangji practically interrupts Wei Wuxian; he turns to Jin Guangyao and shoots back 非也 feiye / false.

I don’t think I can overstate how definitive 非也 feiye is; this goes all the way into the grammar of classical Chinese. 也 ye is an ending particle that gets tacked onto declarative, factual statements, like 曹沫者，鲁人也 Caomo zhe, Lu renye / Cao Mo was a man of Lu or 天下非一人之天下也 tianxia fei yirenzhitianxiaye / the world of all under heaven does not belong to one person. 也 ye isn’t something you’d attach to the end of a judgement or opinion (that’s actually a different particle, 矣 yi, which shows up in 人生得一知己，足矣 / In a lifetime, having one person who knows you is enough). 也 ye is something that’s reserved for like, fact, something as incontrovertible as “person A comes from place B” or the premises of philosophical arguments.

Are we getting a feel for how absolute Lan Wangji’s denial of Jin Guangyao’s accusation is? Great, because it’s very, very absolute, and Lan Wangji’s use of the highest linguistic register available to him perfectly complements his demonstration of his undying commitment to Wei Wuxian in this scene.

Speaking of Wei Wuxian, let’s look at an exchange in episode 9, when Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji do their back-to-back battle sequence in the forest with their eyes closed:

Lan Wangji: 这幻音不仅能让人 迷失方向，还能 扰乱心神。我们现在 根本无法 集中念力. / These illusory sounds can not only make people lose their sense of direction, but also disturb one’s state of mind. Right now, there’s absolutely no way for us to gather our spiritual concentration.

Wei Wuxian: 诶，不对啊，那为什么你没事啊？/ Ei? That’s not right, then why are you completely fine?

Lan Wangji: 枭鸟幻音，心思越多越容易干扰。/ The more thoughts one has, the easier it is to be affected by the illusory sounds of the dire owl.

Wei Wuxian: 这不是明摆着欺负我聪明吗? / Isn’t this obviously picking on me for being smart?

Lan Wangji: [internally, oh my GOD, now is NOT the time for banter]

There are a few four-character set-ups in here, not as many as textbook scene, but Lan Wangji’s fighting for his life in a foggy forest so we’ll cut him some slack. In extenuating circumstances, he’ll drop down to 书面语 shumianyu / elevated vernacular. 

What is fun to look at in this exchange is how colloquial Wei Wuxian is. Not a four-character phrase in sight, and full of colloquialisms. It’s hard to render in translation, but Wei Wuxian is constantly using exclamatory particles like 诶 ei 哦 ou 呗 bei 吗 ma/me 啊 a in his speech, which aren’t usually translated in subtitles (which is a shame for this post, because they’re a dead giveaway for vernacular). I can think of maybe one time in the entire show that Lan Wangji uses one of these particles, and it’s 吗 ma/me, which also performs a grammatical interrogative function, so that barely counts.

Here is a Brief Tangent About Third-Person I Didn’t Know Where Else to Put

There are already great posts about personal names and courtesy names and titles and the etiquette of using them, so I don’t want to re-invent the wheel here, but I do want to talk about speaking in third person.

Speaking in third person performs a similar function to shifting your speech into a higher register; it effectively moves something that might otherwise be more or less colloquial into a more formal context. It’s another way of increasing distance between speaker and listener, and one that often demonstrates respect on the part of the speaker.

Ancient China and Classical Chinese has a Whole Thing About First-Person Pronouns -- there are different first-person pronouns for different situations depending on relative social status in the room, and some people are allowed to use certain first-person pronouns and other people aren’t. For example, 朕 zhen is the imperial first-person pronoun which only the emperor can use; 臣 chen is the first-person pronoun for ministers. You’ll sometimes hear 本公子 bengongzi 本王 benwang 本宫 bengong in political intrigue dramas, which are all self-referential third-person pronouns that more or less translate as this lord / this prince / this royal hall. These are used in situations where the speaker is the highest-ranking person in the room; if a prince goes and speaks to the emperor, we might hear him use 儿臣 erchen / lit. ‘this son and minister’ instead. We hear Wei Wuxian, on occasion, call himself 魏某 Wei-mou, which is a super low-ranking self-identification -- that’s basically calling yourself “some dude with the surname Wei.” You’re not even giving yourself a personal name -- that’s how unimportant you are.

committing a faux-pas and bringing back this screenshot from earlier

Lan Xichen, in episode 3, expresses his concern that he’s overworking his brother/expecting too much of him. In response, Lan Wangji says 忘机分忧而已 / Wangji is doing nothing more than dividing [his brother’s] worries (分忧 fenyou is a lovely little binome that means “to share someone’s worries and relieve their burdens,” but literally means “to divide worries”). Yes, he’s shifts third-person here, but it’s not an idiosyncratic occurrence; he’s uses the respectful distancing granted by the self-referential third-person to demonstrate respect for his brother, right after his brother expresses concern about his own uncertainties and leadership. It’s a deliberate choice, using aspects of social ritual to communicate respect.

We probably see Lan Wangji use the third-person most often in this show, but this isn’t because he’s an awkward speaker -- he’s just exceedingly formal, all the time. And since he doesn’t have a ton of lines to begin with, I think this third-person tendency came to dominate people’s impressions of how he speaks. He uses the regular (modern) first-person pronoun 我 wo plenty of times, such as --

Lan Wangji: 我想带一个人回云深不知处。/ I want to bring someone back to Cloud Recesses.

-- among other memorable moments, like 我有悔 woyouhui / I have regrets.

What I’m TRYING to say is that self-identification via names-as-first-person-pronouns is an established Thing. It’s not a weird verbal tic of Lan Wangji; in fact, it shows up with plenty of other characters (I’m fairly confident that self-referential third-person also happens with Wen Qing, Meng Yao, and Lan Xichen, off the top of my head. Is it a coincidence that these are some of the most polite characters?).

Here’s an example of Wei Wuxian using his personal name as a first-person pronoun in episode 7, when speaking to Lan Yi:

Wei Wuxian: 前辈放心，魏婴定当 全力以赴. / Rest assured, elder -- Wei Ying will of course spare no effort.

This is actually one of the few moments we can see Wei Wuxian kick into a higher register of speech -- both in shifting into third person, as well as strict adherence to four-character phrases. Look, look, Lan Zhan, he can be respectful too!

Okay, one last case study of linguistic register, this time with tears:

tears tears tears

Lan Wangji: 你要想好，此一去便是真正的 离经叛道，不容回头. / You have to think this through. This departure is proper desertion and rebellion. It will allow no return.

Wei Wuxian: 离经叛道？离那本经？叛何方道？/ Desertion of the classics and rebellion against the way? Deserting which classic? Rebelling against which way?

[flashback]

Wei Wuxian: 许我一生 锄奸扶弱。 而如��你告诉我：孰强孰弱，又 孰黒孰白？/ We promised that we would spend our lives eliminating the wicked and supporting the weak. Now tell me: who’s strong, who’s weak? Who’s wrong, and who’s right?

Wei Wuxian：蓝湛，如果我和他们之间 必有一战，那我宁愿和你 决一生死。要死，也至少死在你含光君的手上，不冤了。/ Lan Zhan, if I must fight with them, then I would rather fight to the death with you. If I must die, then at least I would die at your hands -- it would be worth it.

This post, at its inception, was supposed to be about Lan Wangji, but Wei Wuxian continues to offer an engaging and dynamic foil to Lan Wangji in every way possible so I couldn’t resist. The rain scene in episode 27 is an excellent case study of when Wei Wuxian moves from his usual, informal speech patterns into a higher register. Lan Wangji is in his usual mode of elevated vernacular, complete sentences, with two four-character phrases for the count. It’s not his most informal (that would be when he’s drunk) or his most formal (like, all the time, but the schoolroom monologue probably takes the prize).

Wei Wuxian, in his first two chunks of dialogue, is hitting the four-character phrases/idioms hard. In fact, the lines 孰强孰弱 shuqiangshuruo / who’s strong, who’s weak 孰黒孰白 shuheishubai / who’s wrong, who’s right are full-on 文言 wenyan literary/classical; the giveaway, here, is the character 孰 shu -- it’s the archaic/literary variant for 谁 shei / who. This is (I’m pretty sure) the most formal he gets in the entire show, and I think it’s worthwhile to note that he rises to this level in an attempt to reach out to Lan Wangji, of all people.

but wait! we’re not done crying yet!

Because those lines come back to haunt us in episode 43! 

It’s common knowledge that Lan Wangji borrows what Wei Wuxian said, word for word, when he’s being beaten half to death by the Lan Sect. The lines turn from

Wei Wuxian, ep 27: 如今你告诉我：孰强孰弱, 又 孰黒孰白？/ Now tell me: who’s strong, who’s weak? Who’s wrong, and who’s right?

into

Lan Wangji, ep. 43: 敢问叔父，孰正孰邪，孰黑孰白？/ I dare to ask, Uncle -- who’s just, and who’s evil? Who’s wrong, and who’s right?

Wei Wuxian, back in episode 27, was literally speaking to Lan Wangji on Lan Wangji’s linguistic register, which few (if any) other characters rise to throughout the show. So it’s no accident that Lan Wangji internalizes Wei Wuxian’s words; that when Lan Wangji turns them on Lan Qiren, he’s taken the structure of Wei Wuxian’s entire line and shifted it into the highest linguistic register possible to emphasize his utmost respect for the principles he believes in, essentially codifying it into an alternate school of thought he offers up as a challenge to the Lan Sect’s fifty-second rule: 不得结交奸邪 / do not befriend the traitorous and evil.

Conclusion

this post is so long I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a tl;dr thing at the end

1) various aspects of Chinese and classical Chinese make self-referential third-person and linguistic register a demonstration of distance and respect rather than an idiosyncratic mode of speech

2) in Chinese, you can cut out a great deal of a sentence in the name of elevating language without losing grammatical integrity

3) Lan Wangji is super formal, all the time

4) when Wei Wuxian kicks into a higher linguistic register, you know shit is going down

5) I’m incapable of writing short posts and it’s a bit of a problem, send aid

[blueshenanigans]

What do you mean long? I thought it was too short! Also, thank you so much on this analysis of LWJ's character, it made me understand what kind of person he is a little bit more. And what kind of person WWX is lol

Thank you!!!!!

all right guys, let’s have a conversation about linguistic register, Lan Wangji, and I guess Wei Wuxian can come too

(and I do genuinely mean conversation, I’d love to hear other people’s input on this, because I did just write a long-ass post about the subjectivity of interpretation in translations)

So when I started interacting with the fandom and reading people’s fics, I got really confused by the way some folks were writing dialogue for Lan Wangji; he often sounded super awkward, spoke in fragments, and sometimes exclusively in third person. To be fair, all of those are elements of his speech at various times, but like, seeing it in English-language material felt like a really heavy-handed way of rendering it in translation?

I guess when you use third person within the first three episodes of the show, it makes a pretty big impression on the audience

This is not at all intended to be a criticism of people who are 1000% writing and creating wonderful work, which is more than I can say for myself, but I want to poke and prod and tease at some linguistic nuance here.

Take a deep breath, grab a pot of tea (this’ll take more than a cup), because we’re going to take the scenic route on this one–

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