《為政》 Passage 2.17

the Master said

• 子 the Master, Confucius (honorific title)
• 曰 said, spoke (introduces a quotation)

You, given name of the disciple Zilu (Zhong You 仲由)

to teach, instruct

you, second-person pronoun

to know, posed as a rhetorical question

• 知 to know, understand
• 乎 interrogative final particle

乎 marks this as a question; Slingerland, Peimin Ni and Roberts turn it into a statement instead.

it, referring to what is to be known

all eight translators drop this object pronoun; Lau's 'what it is to know' and Watson's 'what it means to know' use 'it' only as the dummy subject of an English cleft construction, not as a rendering of this pronoun. English leaves the object of 知 implicit here rather than wording it.

to know

it, a thing (what is known)

rendered explicitly only by Legge ('a thing') and Chin ('something').

to assert, to hold that

translators split between reading 為 as the copula 'to be/count as' and as an assertive 'to say/hold that'.

to know

it, what is known

to not know, to lack knowledge of something

• 不 not
• 知 to know, understand

to assert, to hold that

translators split between reading 為 as the copula 'to be/count as' and as an assertive 'to say/hold that'.

to not know, to lack knowledge of something

• 不 not
• 知 to know, understand

this, that

knowledge, wisdom

here 知 is the noun 'knowledge, wisdom', read zhì as for 智 (楊伯峻: 知，同智), against the verb zhī used earlier in the passage.

final particle of affirmation, equivalent to 'is'

Seals 是知 as a judgment — 'this: knowledge'. Chinese has no copula here, and the 'is' every translator writes is what the 也 becomes: the assertion the particle makes, supplied as a verb.