Then it’s not the Chinese word for “crisis.”
It’s customary (and polite and helpful) to provide a link to the relevant column when starting a thread. In this case, I assume: Is the Chinese word for “crisis” a combination of “danger” and “opportunity”? - The Straight Dope … if it’s something else, please let me know and I’ll amend.
And I’m not sure what point you’re making. Cecil says that the Chinese word for crisis originally didn’t mean crisis. The key bit here is the word “originally” – he was talking about third century Chinese. Words evolve over time. It means “crisis” now.
My point is not to take issue with Cecil’s answer; I was really making a cynical comment about the “gee whizness” mentioned by the questioner of taking words in two separate languages and finding a deep meaning in the fact that they are…different words. (.e. “crisis” in Chinese embraces “danger” and “opportunity”)
When we say a word in one language “means” something in another, what we are really saying is that the two words are used in similar situations. If the Chinese use a word that connotes “precarious moment” (for example) and English speakers use a word “crisis,” to say that “precarious moment” means “crisis” is a shorthand way of saying the two words are similar. However since the two languages are different, I find no particular gee whiz if a word in one language has a completely different etymological history or nuance than does its “equivalent” in another language.
Here’s an example. The most appropriate time I heard the Chinese “weiji” was during the “great reset” when Lehman Brothers died and the global economy tanked.
So, in that context, “weiji” does mean an opportunity for those that can take advantage of it. Maybe “Crisis with an opportunity” is the more appropriate translation?
I always want to have some motivational speaker say this to me. I have the perfect comback all lined up.
Well, “crisis” even just in English certainly implies danger and it does carry some connotations of opportunity too, although these are often downplayed. Crises typically do give rise to opportunities (for someone, not necessarily you). It is possible that Chinese idiom foregrounds this fact a little more than the English word, in itself, typically does, but even if that is not the case, it is not illegitimate to remind people of the fact, so that they are alert for the possible opportunities attendant on a crisis, and do not focus exclusively on mitigating the dangers.
Nobody should be surprised when a word’s meaning isn’t identical to its usual translation.
Exactly. Two different languages.
And that’s also exactly why there’s no “Gee whiz, isn’t that amazing??!!” when one language’s term ends up having different nuances than another.
As I said, if the Chinese word for “crisis” doesn’t mean “crisis,” it’s not the Chinese word for “crisis.” It’s some other word used in similar context.
Note that this is not a beef with Cecil, but with speakers blathering on about this sort of nonsense.
I will now go attend to the crisis that I’m late for a meeting and have no gas in my car. No danger. But no opportunity to get gas, either; that’s why it’s a crisis.
This is the problem with being a pedant…
It’s really just a comment on how a word used in similar contexts can have a very different second order signifier which may not be expected.
Often a word in one language has no exact translation in another, even if you don’t go word-to-word, but word-to-phrase.
One that always bothered me was the word “обидеться” in Russian. Dictionaries translate it as “to take offense” or “to be hurt”, but that just doesn’t catch the Russian meaning.
crisitunity
If you have a little knowledge of Chinese (e.g. more than the general audience that Cecil was aiming at with his original post), you’ll probably find Victor Mair’s essay on the topic to be of interest. In short, the “ji” part of “weiji” does not mean “opportunity”, simply “moment” or “juncture”. It didn’t even have anything to do with the word “opportunity” (“jihui”) until very recently, and “ji” still doesn’t mean “jihui” any more than “port” means “opportunity”.
In English, the word “crisis” is made up of parts of “crime” and “sister”. That doesn’t mean that a crisis is a crime against your sister. Or something.
I would think that if there were any truth to the notion that the chinese characters for “Crisis” also mean “danger and opportunity”, then Chinese people would be primed to look at a crisis as an opportunity, far more so than cultures where that is not embedded in the words. Is there any evidence that the culture does so?
And I see that my thoughts are already explained by the Victor Mair article.
Thanks for the link. I’m not convinced. Just had a chat with my wife, who is a native Chinese speaker. She is of the opinion that “weiji” *is *a crisis (and to a certain extent a crisis laden inflection point), but that she and Chinese like her also view it as an opportunity. She stressed that the “opportunity” part was not equal to the crisis (inflection pint) but that Chinese would view it as turning around a bad thing into an opportunity (lemons into lemonade).
Certainly, when we lived in Shanghai up until about 2 years ago, “weiji” was not so cut and dried IMHO as just a crisis.
(BTW, American but a Chinese major for undergrad, lived in Taiwan, HK, Chinese countryside and Shanghai for 20+ years)
Well, if you’re going to be pedantic, it’s still a crisis even if there’s a convenient gas station. Not a very compelling one, I’ll grant.
In fact, given that a significant percentage of Americans, possibly a majority, doesn’t really know the meaning of the word “crisis” in the first place, comparisons with roughly equivalent foreign words or phrases seem exceptionally pointless.
tou ji (plunge-into opportunity)
in the context given, would be better translated as “speculation”.
reference: http://baike.baidu.com/view/140991.htm
My opinion is that “wei ji” simply means “crisis” originally. There is a saying that "危机即转机“, meaning “a crisis is a turning point/opportunity for change”, which I suspect is a relatively recent word play-turned-meme.
I am a native speaker of both English and Mandarin, currently living in China. I am not a linguist and this is nothing but personal, unresearched, anecdotal opinion.
It has been my understanding that many Chinese characters such as wei-ji for crisis, are composed so that the left in this case wei) half gives a hint as to the pronunciation while the right (ji) half indicates meaning. This is far from perfect, but it does give readers some idea of how to pronounce unfamiliar words. In the case under discussion, I feel the idea of not only including a hint as to pronunciation, but of danger to an opportunity could help indicate a crisis sort of situation. Or, as Charlie Chan says, in murder there is no law of relativity, or something like that.
It’s not necessarily guaranteed which part of a “phrase” has actual meaning.
There are words where all of the meaning is in the right character, with the left as “filler”, like 老虎 (tiger, the first character literally means “old” but 虎 is the only word that means “tiger”).
There are words where most of the meaning is in the right character, some meaning in the left, like 乌龟 (turtle, the first character means “dark” and it’s an apt description of most turtles).
There are words where both characters have equal meaning and the meaning would be lost without either, like 电脑 (computer, or “electric brain”)
There are words where most of the meaning is in the left character, some in the right, like 国家 (country/nation, the second character meaning “house/home” and thus the connotation is the land of your birth).
There are words where all of the meaning is in the left character, the right character being filler, like 荔枝 (litchi , the second character meaning “branch”)
And that’s just two character “phrases”. There’s also longer phrases (三轮车, tricycle, or “three wheeled vehicle”), idiomatic expressions (对牛弹琴 literally means “playing lute to a cow” and means “talking to someone who has no understanding or appreciation of the subject matter”), wordplay (和尚打伞─无法无天, “a monk under an umbrella [is] lawless and godless”, because the character for “hair” and “law” are pronounced the same in Mandarin Chinese), and allusions to history, literature, philosophy, or religion that make no sense unless you know the background thereof (三民主义, “the trifold people’s ideal”, Sun Yat-Sen’s take on that whole “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” thing).
In the case of 危机, I personally think it’s a case of Main Meaning Left, Slight Secondary Connotation Right. The emphasis is 危, danger. 机 in this case might be better translated as “chance”. So a crisis is a chance of great danger–the overall connotation is, therefore, negative. There’s a great idiom for the concept of high risk/high reward:不入虎穴，不得虎子, or “without entering the tiger’s den, [you] can’t get a tiger cub”, which in my opinion is 100% more bad-ass than CRISIS = DANGER + OPPORTUNITY.
I find breaking apart a phrase to milk new meanings out of it is a suspect practice. Why not translate 危机 as “dangerous machinations”, “rouge engine”, or even “might be steep”, based on alternate meanings of either 危 or 機?