Verbiage help!

[Tibby]

Hello! I am writing a book that is set in the Han Dynasty era in China. More specifically Western Han (Former Han) set in 202 BCE - 9 CE. I am a native English speaker, writing from the point of view of a character from a different country is hard enough. But this is an especially big challenge for me, I am writing this is English but I want it to read as if the character is speaking from when this took place. I have no idea where to start. I know that during that time the verbiage people used was highly formal, respectful, heavily influenced by confucian ideals, and utilized indirect language. I was wondering if anyone has any insight as to how I can achieve this in my writing.

[lordsuso]

there is a 2005 tv show called 汉武大帝, you might get some inspiration from the translated subtitles here https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1-upGnLLXSGzUzhajflSgtOp2OeuxUDz&si=4tOR5gtRK81A6xga

 

you might find better quality translations in books, I dont know any set in that period but the three kingdoms is relatively close (so the rules and ways of speaking were similar?) and I am sure it has very high quality translations

[Jim]

On 2/20/2025 at 10:27 PM, Tibby said:

I know that during that time the verbiage people used was highly formal, respectful, heavily influenced by confucian ideals, and utilized indirect language.

I'm not sure we do know that, just that most of the surviving record has people speaking in that way, but whether that's how folk chatted in the market and sat on the kang we can't really say, but I'd expect it to be informal. Then we have some surviving texts, such as the Zhuangzi likely composed even earlier, that have some quite colloquial exchanges.

Micheal Loewe's Bing: From Farmer's Son to Magistrate in Han China is a fictionalised account of one man's rise through the social ranks, worth checking out. Loewe is a noted scholar of the period and he imagines some fairly lively conversations between his imagined everyman and the people he meets along the way. Review here (PDF): https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/bing-from-farmers-son-to-magistrate-in-han-china.pdf