I want to facepalm so hard every time I come back to this thread.
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Originally Posted by Splendour
Logic does not trump practical relevance. You have to know the times when someone does something because the times give you the context and a better understanding of the origins and motives.
Yes, you're right when you say that a better understanding of the times translates into a better understanding of the characters in question. However, as far as I know, each character was only "created" once. Understanding the environment in which these characters were derived from could only further explain
why they used "boat" (舟) and "a marsh at the foot of the hills" (㕣) to create the word "boat or large vessel" (船). Trying to assert that the elements of this character may have originally meant something else is like me trying to say that the "zoo" in "zoology" might have meant "a parklike area (blahblahblah)" before it meant "animal" in Greek depending on "the times."
For clarification, that wasn't "logic." That was an analogy.
Speaking of logic; looking up a character's etymology is not "logic." In fact, I believe it's the people behind this slide who are using fuzzy logic.
Just for fun,
http://www.chineseetymology.org/Char...ton1=Etymology show's how the word "first" (先) came about
: forward footprint 止 of person 儿. Kind of blows this,
out of the water, doesn't it?
But of course, none of this matters because me? I am no expert.
And so, I present to the thread, this:
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/creati...haracters.html , a
collection of articles and letters written by
EXPERTS!!!!!!!!!1
A few highlights:
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I found a great number of the proposed etymologies to be far-fetched, as, indeed, Mr. Swanson admits they might seem. To me one of the most blatant examples was the statement that the symbol for fire, which is surely a pictogram of leaping flames, was derived from a glorified man, simply because the two signs are somewhat similar. (But the early forms, as shown, were not.)
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Another pictogram, which the book explains as an ideogram, which it is not, is that for clothes. Note the original form. [The original pictogram for “clothes” looks nothing like the later depiction. -- Ed.]
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Another fault of the book is that it often ignores the fact that some Chinese characters are phonetic in nature, so that every single element need not contribute to the meaning.
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In fact, the reduplication of “tree” does not indication specifically two trees, but a number of trees, as is shown by the character for “woods” or “forest.” In this connection, the sign with three elements means more particularly “forest,” i.e., a large number of trees.
- Letter Published in The Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 19, June, 1982. Comment on
The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language by C. H. Kang and Ethel Nelson (this is the book that most of the religious sites cite from).
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woman + trees = desire, covet
Nope. The two trees "lin" are phonetic in the compound character, "lan".
serpent + trees = negative, no, not
Nope. It's "two divergent rods which one seeks to tie together".
mouth + tree = restrain
Nope. "To encompass a tree, here taken to mean any object; to tie; to knot."
tree + enclosure (garden) = difficulty
Nope. The original character was a bit different from the modern form, so "Weariness, exhaustion that forces [one] to stop on the way, to sleep under a tree. The modern form represents the same idea, but not so clearly; a camping under a tree." Note that many Southern Chinese languages have a word, also pronounced "kun", that means "to sleep".
hand + lance + me + sheep = righteousness
Nope. There is no hand. Rather, the word for "I" is composed of two lances. "Two weapons in conflict, two rights that oppose one another, my right, and, by extension, my Ego." The sheep has the "Idea of sweetness, of peace, of harmony", thus the full character is "Harmony, good, understanding, peace restored after a conflict; convention concluded after a disagreement, restoring concord and giving satisfaction to the interested parties. Hence all the derived meanings..."
noble person + lamb, sheep = beautiful
Close enough. "A man resembling to the lamb, sweet, gentle, good".
- Letter from a Chinese expert on "Genesis and Chinese characters"
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The first Web page isn't bad, but the next five are full of errors. The most obvious error, of course, is analyzing radical-phonetic compounds as though they were ideographic.
However, many components of ideographic compounds are also misidentified. And unitary pictographs are also incorrectly analyzed as ideographic compounds. These last two kinds of errors are made easy by the use of modern character forms, rather than going back to the old seal styles.
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There seems to be a sort of desperation in this grasping for support--only the most desperate would resort to such patent sophistry.
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Another page by Nelson includes a footnote that says, "Until 1911, the Chinese emperors celebrated a sacrificial rite very similar to that of the Hebrews. Analysis of the early character forms indicates that the ancient Chinese worshiped the same Creator-God as the Hebrews."
Of course, the sacrifice was to the emperor's ancestors (and the emperor was not the only one to make such sacrifices). Wieger's Chinese Characters has a section on this.
- More bogus Chinese character analysis
Done.