Hua Tuo, master physician

You'd know that better than me I'm afraid, I've never visited the Brooklyn Museum! I found it online by simply using the Baidu (百度) search engine!

Glad you like it though, it is rather lovely I think.

奇怪呀，我以为每一个中国人跟这些故事很熟悉。

Hi Baba, I see now nciku gives only the definition "unlike" for 不比, while my dictionary (as mentioned above) tells me it means "there's no comparison". If it were working in the sense of "unlike" though, with the 差 there the sentence would make no sense--"unlike the famous visiting doctor, Hua Tuo's diagnostic ability was lacking".

I still think this is a negation of 比 ~ 差, not a 不比.

Good question zhen. My guess when I read it was that 不比 【unlike] was working in combination with 差 【lack,poor] to compare him to the other famous visiting doctor. Hua Tuo's skill was unlike the famous doctor who was found to come up short. Or maybe 差 is just being used in it's first tone use to again emphasize the difference between the two and the context has given us who came out on top.

Thing is, it strikes me as distinctly un-Chinese, his style.

@zhenlijiang/tal, Modesty? If you only knew... Still, I don't want to detract from the story.

He's clearly incorporated Chinese modesty into his persona!

Thanks for your input Tvan. I always wonder why, with all your years of experience and serious study, you package yourself that way!

Ah Tal those are your translations. Sorry, wasn't picking up on that. Well we do have the benefit of the background knowledge that 华佗 later would become a 神医. And his diagnostic ability being superior is not in question if you think about it; after all the visiting doctor didn't know what needed to be done, whereas 华佗 was positive his teacher was not sick at all.

But so anyway I wasn't misreading that sentence. If I had no clue about your thinking here, I might have thought by translating it like that you were calling attention to a cultural difference that we're meant to note--that in China it would just not do, to say that the famous visiting doctor was actually incompetent even if we're left with that impression anyway.

Again, I'd rather not take up too much time or space discussing translation here. Through reading these tales I'd like to learn how things are expressed in Chinese. But I guess it's inevitable that we'll have these issues from time to time.

呵呵, but then it wasn't his own teacher he had to be better than, right? It was 'the visiting team'. His own teacher might have got a kick out of seeing his student prove more insightful than a rival (?)

Translations aside, you have to be better than your teacher to graduate? Aside from a couple of professors I had, that's a pretty tall order!

Like I said last time zhen, I'm not aiming to do a literal translation, I intend it to just be a guide to working out the meaning for those that need it. Having said that please do pick me up on things I might have wrong. My understanding of that sentence was 'his ability was not inferior to' the famous visiting physician, and taking context into account, I decided that meant he was actually superior to him (in diagnostic ability at least!) Perhaps my free translation of "more capable than" is indeed a trifle too free!

@zhenlijiang, I get something along the lines of "he isn't inferior" to the other physician, therefore he could graduate. However, that's from my very uneducated, 白鬼 point of view.