I read the new column in my local weekly, but it has apparently not yet arrived in cyberspace. Oh well, you all will see what I’m talking about soon enough.
Of course, I can’t argue with Cecil’s main point, that being that when translating from one language to another, one must take with a grain of salt the semantics involved.
I can, however, ask Cecil (and, for that matter, Alison) what exactly they mean by Chinese. So, what exactly do you guys mean by Chinese? Do you mean Gan, Hakka, Huizhou, Jinyu, Mandarin, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Nan, Min Zhong, Pu-Xhian, Wu, Xiang, or Yue? Or did you mean Chinese Sign Language? Or did you mean one of the numerous other languages or dialects spoken in the enormous and, therefore not surprisingly, linguistically diverse country called China? I mean, for someone so attuned to crucial details so much of the time, how can you talk about Chinese as a single language?
I haven’t seen this specific column, but I’m familiar with the story in question. The circumstances of this question are in regard to a Chinese character; that is, the WRITTEN form of Chinese.
The written form of Chinese is basically the same in all dialects; thus dialect is irrelevant to this question.
(The story is that the character for crisis is made up of the characters for ‘opportunity’ and ‘danger.’ While technically true, it shows ignorance of how Chinese characters are formed; the radicals were not used to convey the philosophic idea that any crisis can be seen as an opportunity.)
Perhaps Alison’s skepticism would be diminished by looking at the English root of crisis, which is decision. And any decision can be both an opportunity and a danger. The Chinese word summarizes the choices we have in a crisis, either toward resolution or greater distress.
This is the linguistic root of the word. When it was invented it just meant danger. The meaning changed over time. Therefore, the word was NOT meant to show that there is both danger and opportunity in a crisis.
Single syllabic words often tend to be paired with synonyms in Chinese words, to create longer words that mean the same thing. This is because there are many more homophones in Chinese than English, so hearing just one syllable is not always very informative.
Japanese is more complicated. It includes ideograms (“kanji”) that derive from Chinese – though many of them have become simplified over the centuries – but it also possesses two phonetic syllabaries, one of which (“katakana”) is used to spell foreign words or words for which one cannot recall a character (it was also used for all words on older computers that couldn’t handle ideograms), and the other of which (“hirigana”) was historically used by women, whose tiny female brains couldn’t possibly learn the regular system. (Somehow or other, those tiny female brains have gotten much larger in the last generation or so.) By learning to recognize the katakana occasionally embedded among the kanji, a westerner can learn to distinguish between Japanese and Chinese at sight, without actually knowing either language.
The Japanese spoken language, by the way, has no relationship to Chinese (or any other known language) at all.
John W. Kennedy, from reading your post I get the impression that you are implying that hiragana is no longer used. Here’s what I remember from japanese class: Hiragana used to be known (around the year 1000 I think) as the “woman’s hand)”, the script used by ladies at court. But it is also used in modern-day japanese for common words etc… so in modern-day japanese you will see kanji (characters), katakana (for foreign words etc…) and hiragana. To make sure I didn’t say anything stupid I went to look it up at Encyclopædia Britannica and here’s what they had to say:
The Altaic family of languages has about 40 languages, classified into three groups: Turkkic, Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus. Sample languages in this family:
Turkic group: Turkish, Azerbaijanai, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uighur, Tatar, KazakhKirghiz, Bashkir.
Mongolian group: Mongol (aka Khalka), etc…
Manchu-Tungus group: mostly dialects. Manchu language used to be a common language for communication between China and the outside world, but now very few speak it.
I lived in Japan and learned Japanese. In Japanese, the word for crisis is kiki. I forget which is which, but one of the ki’s is the Chinese character for danger, and the other ki is the Chinese character for opportunity. In case you are wondering how to say that there is opportunity in a crisis in Japanese, it’s “Kiki wa kikai desu.” I know that because I once sat through a motivational speech by a Japanese man and he used that phrase, and even drew the characters out for us to see.