By "intelligible," what is meant is that the language is comprehensible to a general audience; if it cannot be understood by the average native speaker without further training, it is considered "unintelligible." The intelligibility criterion cleverly captures the lay view of the vernacular/classical divide: Vernacular Chinese is Chinese written in language the layperson can under-stand; everything else is relegated to classical Chinese regardless of the source of the difficulty. This view is often reflected in popular comments about writing styles: certain styles are difficult to understand because they are too
wenyan (classical/literary), as if classical Chinese stands for all that is obscure or arcane.
There are problems with this approach, however. The first is that intelligibility judgments are necessarily limited to the here and now, for we have no way of determining whether people in ancient times can understand a particular style of writing or not.
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