Okay, i’ve ben reading The Anthony C. Yu translation of The Journey to the West (because i don’t have the time nor energy to learn Chinese right now…).
But something confused; me for those of you taht have it (if any), it’s on page 67 about 3 quarters of the way down the page in volume 1.
“There was on top of that very mountain an immortal stone, which measured thirty-six feet and five inches in heights and twenty-four feet in circumference. The height of thirty-six feet and five inchescorresponded tot he three hndred and sixty-five cyclical degrees, while the circumference of twenty-four feet corresponded to the twenty-four solar terms of the calender.”
Okay, teh 24 solar periods, whatever, but 365 cyclical degrees? Either:
A. I’ve been failing trig and not knowing it.
B. The Chinese had some mathematical system that had a few extra degrees.
C. It corresponded to our modern days of the year.
D. Some odd freak of translation that makes little to no sense in english/the present time.
or
E. Cyclical degrees are different from the degrees i’m thinking of.
So, anyone an expert on ancient Chinese texts, or at least have any ideas?
(In addition and completely off topic… is does the board itself have a search feature, it wasn’t under forum tools where it is ont eh other vBulletin based forums I usually go to).
The origin of the 360-degree circle is ancient calendars which had 360-day years. If the Chinese had developed a solar calendar by that point, they might have thought of circles as having 365 degrees.
Or, it could just be a mistake in the translation.
Why would that be so? Did the Chinese use feet and inches as units of measurement? If each foot correspnds to 10 degrees, shouldn’t each inch, 1/12th of a foot, correspond to 10/12 = 0.83333… degrees? That’d make the height represent 364.16666… degrees, not 365.
I suspect that the best way to figure out what was really being said in the passage would be to find a different translation and see what that translator does with the text. The rendering to English measurement may mask a more serious paraphrase and this would be a good way to see how loose a translation you have.
Well, yeah, I figured that the feet/inches was a translation convenience, so they didn’t need 4 pages of footnotes explaining Chinese units of measurement. I was just confused by 365 degrees.
Yeah i’ll try a different translation, just to see if they do the same. I mean, even the Bible is a mess sometimes when it comes to translating units of measure, especally when the numbers have more significance than the units. Usually they want to say “Big with a significant number” so you usually translate it as a measurement we percieve as big (metres, yards etc) and then use translation convenience to do that and keep the importatn number, so i figured that the inches and feet were a convenience so we could understand what was going on, and the actual number had the significance.