 These communicative difficulties could, however, also be seen as a blessing in disguise, for they seem to have given Chinese thinkers two distinct linguistic media for communicating their thoughts and feelings: speaking their native tongue, a natural language, and writing classical Chinese using characters, at least a semi-artificial language (but one with great beauty and power to affect readers). Thus what follows “so-and-so said” in any classical text is very rarely a strict transcription of what the speaker actually said; instead, it very probably indicated in brief form what was meant. Adding a syntactic/stylistic note in this context, one scholarly wit has said of the classical language  