If the student new to the study of Chinese philosophy takes away one idea from this brief summarization of a complex set of interconnected linguistic issues focusing on texts, perhaps the most fruitful one would be that the writing of philosophy in classical Chinese affects the philosophy written in a number of ways that call into question the unquestioned assumption that writing is simply transcribed speech, relatively unaffected by its means of transmission. This is a dubious idea for any language, but especially suspect with classical Chinese. Consider the following from Michael Nylan, writing about the compositions of the Han Dynasty scholar-official and author Yang Xiong (53 BCE–18 CE):