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Still interested in Chinese etymology?

lindsay

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If you are still interested in Chinese etymology, you may be interested to learn a major book on the subject is due to be published at the end of this month (July). You are also to be congratulated on your perseverance, not to mention stamina. I figure by the time Confucius is done with us, we'll all be so immersed in the pseudo-history of the Yi that the real thing won't matter anymore. Still, I'm enjoying his posts very much. It's all part of the wacky world of Yi-ology.

Lindsay
 
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hmesker

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Thanks for the tip Lindsay. I do hope however that Schuessler did a better job with this book than with A Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese. The latter is lacking in amount, information, definitions and meanings of characters.

But of course I immediately ordered his new book. Can't wait to have it.

Harmen.
 

toganm

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hmesker said:
But of course I immediately ordered his new book. Can't wait to have it.
I have placed it in my wish list. Hope you will do a review of the book when you receive it

Togan
 
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hmesker

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When I have it, which will take some months, I will put my findings in this thread. I am also interested in the opinion of other buyers.

Harmen.
 

heylise

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This is an answer to the thread about etymology of Qian, but I better post it here.

I have been thinking a lot about this etymology business. It is what gave me so much access to Yi, so for me it is something essential. Of course this is no proof at all, that it has any meaning, apart from what I myself happen to use it for.

But apart from that, I don't think it is right to say, that Chinese is not an ideographic language. In Chinese there is a lot which is not ideographic anymore, but that does not imply, that as a whole, it is not. And certainly not, that it did not start out as one.

I feel I have to back up my words with "something scientific", or it will not be taken seriously. I searched for an article which did not reflect anyone's personal opinion. One would expect there is no such thing in science, but the opposite is true. And one single professor with a strong personal opinion passes it on to a whole generation of students. An article from an encyclopedia seemed to me, to have a larger chance of being unbiased. So I am quoting from Encarta.

WORD (OR LOGOGRAM) SYSTEMS
Word writing systems are characterized by many signs called logograms which represent complete words. Such signs frequently represent a series of related words, and in many cases, one sign represents several separate and distinct words. In purely logographic writing, such distinctions usually remain unresolved and the writing is ambiguous.


This is the main reason why I love Chinese so much, its ambiguity. It gives room for creativity. For poetry or dreaming or, in this case, for the ambiguity an oracle needs: saying something in a way which easily awakens what needs to be known. When words are too specific, they are too narrow for that.

Certain types of signs, however, can be used to resolve the ambiguity and assure correct reading of the logogram. These signs are used as semantic and phonetic indicators and are often called determinatives and phonetic complements. Determinatives are signs used to indicate the class or category to which the word represented by the logogram belongs. Determinatives are logograms themselves and are not read but serve only to indicate the semantic group, such as gods, countries, birds, fish, verbs of motion, verbs of building, objects made of wood, objects made of stone, and so on, to which the logogram belongs.

So a determinative (or radical) has a meaning without having a sound, at least not in the word in which they are used. They are not phonetic. Not 'rebus' either, because they are not used for a sound.

Phonetic complements are similar in use but more specific in that they show part or all of the pronunciation of the word that the logogram represents. In modern alphabetic writing in English, for example, the logogram “2” is read “two.” When the ordinal number is referred to, however, the phonetic complement “d” is attached and the logogram, plus complement “2nd,” is read “second.” In this example, for the first time, signs are used for purely phonetic (or nonlogographic) purposes. In other words, the sign functions not to call to mind an idea and the word associated with it, but to recall a sound which is part of the word that the logogram being read represents. Originally, phonetic indicators were chosen from the logograms that have a meaning corresponding to the desired sound. This device is known as phonetic transfer or, more commonly, rebus writing. Like determinatives, phonetic indicators are not to be read but serve only to facilitate the reading of the basic logogram.

Originally, phonetic indicators were chosen from the logograms that have a meaning corresponding to the desired sound."
This is most of all my point. They are chosen because of their meaning. I agree with Chinese being rebus writing, but I cannot agree with Chinese NOT AT ALL being ideographic. For both it should be "not only".
Phonetic indicators are chosen from 'meaning-related' words, not just random only for the sound.

So in both cases, of the indicator and the phonetic complement, it can be very useful to find out the original meaning – the etymology. I don't say, that it always is, but in my experience, in the Yi, very often it is very useful. Maybe because the Yi is so old, maybe because it is an oracle and made as such. I don't know about modern Chinese, it might make very little sense there.

About this very special book we are talking about, the Yi:
I have seen examples, that a painter, who writes a poem or sentence on his work, which they do/did very often in China, would choose characters which illustrate what he wants to say. Not only in their meaning, but also in the way they look, their realistic image. For science this might be 'only' artistic fancy, but then they are not being very scientific: art is part of life, just as commerce is and eating and writing. Using a character in such a way is also making use of its etymology. I remember a poem on a painting with a mountain, using the character mountain for its mountain-shape.
I would not be surprised at all, when an artist, creating an oracle (I see divining as a creative profession) would rather choose words which evoke images, than words which are only words.
Probably the Yi started out as an oral text, and only later was written down. In the course of centuries, the text has been changed, in bigger and smaller ways, absorbing images and stories which clarified a line. So a lot has been added in writing, not only speaking. Chinese writing makes very often use of expressive characters.
View attachment 52
At left are the modern characters for man/male and woman/female. I have put them side by side, so the difference of expression can be seen. In the Oracle Bone characters next to them, the original picture can still be seen, but not anymore in the modern ones. But even so they show this expression.

This is the article in Encarta
LiSe
 

ewald

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The Chinese characters are built from a limited set of basic characters. I think that a lot of these basic characters are actually ideographic. And I have seen a lot of them used on their own in the Zhouyi. That is not to say that those characters haven't acquired additional meanings, that can be more useful than their original meaning in the text.

On Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server you can search for Chinese characters by selecting the basic characters they are a combination of.
This Wikipedia article has a list of the basic characters with the English meanings added.
 
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hmesker

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ewald said:
The Chinese characters are built from a limited set of basic characters.
That might be the case now, but it was not so in the early days of writing. Oracle bone inscriptions have hardly any systemization or limitation to the used components, they just drew what they needed to convey the appropriate meaning. There are recurring elements like the sign for man, woman, roof, house, etc., but there are also a lot of OBI characters which will never fit in a predefined scheme of radicals (of a lot of these charactes we don't know the modern equivalent). The same goes for bronze inscriptions. The 金文引得, a 2-volume index to more than 7000 bronze inscriptions, gives characters which have no current equivalent, and of which they were not able to convert them to a modern looking character using known components.
Although the Kang Xi Zidian uses 214 radicals, the Shuowen Jiezi needed 540 to give each character a place in the dictionary, which might be an indication of the more complex form of characters at that time.

In other words, systemization/classification occured quite late, and it is not a feature used in the early days of writing. Chinese characters at that time did not consist of a fixed set of components, it was only later when characters were dissected in several parts, and it is likely that some characters were changed to fit the current ordering and improve uniformity. As Qin Shihuangdi said in the movie Hero : "17 ways to write the character jian 劍, 'sword'? Isn't that very inconvenient? When I have conquered the remaining kingdoms I will change that". It is possible that all these variant characters would not fit in an ordering of 540 or less components. So, skip what is redundant and make reading easier.

Harmen.
 

ewald

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Interesting.
But how about the characters used in the Zhouyi? I certainly haven't checked thoroughly, but my general impression from consulting www.chineseetymology.org is that lots of the old forms do have some resemblance to the modern characters as they show up on my computer screen. Also, the Shuowen texts that that site displays, renders fine for 95% of the characters (some codes in the text make me think that the remaining 5% doesn't).

But I wouldn't be surprised if the characters as they were at the time of the Zhouyi were actually more ideographic than they are now.
 
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hmesker

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ewald said:
But how about the characters used in the Zhouyi? I certainly haven't checked thoroughly, but my general impression from consulting www.chineseetymology.org is that lots of the old forms do have some resemblance to the modern characters as they show up on my computer screen.
Ehrm, okay, but what is your point? Anyway, on the site you mention you can only look up modern characters, it is impossible to lookup a OBI or BI character that does not have a modern equivalent. If you check an oracle bone inscription dictionary like the 新編甲骨文字典 or 甲骨文字典, you will see that there are a lot of characters which would not fit any system using radicals.

Also, the Shuowen texts that that site displays, renders fine for 95% of the characters (some codes in the text make me think that the remaining 5% doesn't).
Okay, but what does that have to do with 'characters being made of a fixed amount of components"?

But I wouldn't be surprised if the characters as they were at the time of the Zhouyi were actually more ideographic than they are now.
Yes, they were. That is already apparent in the Chujian bamboo manuscripts which, although younger, use a kind of writing which to me looks very similar to OBI. I assume the first Yi used a similar kind of writing, or something that was close to bronze inscriptions.


Harmen.
 

lindsay

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I am not a sinologist, and if I go much farther with this discussion, I'll soon be in over my head and drowning. I prefer to talk about things I know.

To me, Lise's encyclopedia article does not seem inconsistent with other information I've read about the Chinese language, including the passage I quoted earlier by S. Robert Ramsey from his "Languages of China" book. Yet we seem to be drawing very different conclusions from similar material.

To me, Lise's argument above is full of "special pleading" for making an exception for the Yijing. Why should we do that? Indeed, since most linguistic work these days is based on the OBI, ancient divination texts, I would have thought it was especially relevant to the Yi.

I have presented what I believe is the current scholarly consensus about the development of Chinese characters and the value of traditional etymological analysis. Take it or leave it, the choice is yours. Better still, look into it for yourself.

Theories change over time, and the experts are sometimes wrong. More often, new evidence or analysis emerges which brings the picture into sharper focus. Clarity is everything. True paradigm shifts are rare.

Finally, I do believe that in the realm of divination anything that makes sense is valid. If Lise can deepen or broaden our understanding of the gua by analyzing their components, then we as diviners are the richer for it, whatever the sinologists might say. The world of divination does not follow the same rules and restrictions as the world of discursive thought. Anything that helps us imagine what the Yi is telling us is of great value. My failures as a diviner come mostly from not being able to see enough rather than from seeing things wrongly.

In this forum we are constantly travelling over the borders between reason and intuition, fact and imagination, logic and feeling, science and poetry, daily life and art, logos and myth. No one stands guard to stamp our passports, and sometimes it's hard to remember which country we're in. This little argument over etymology is a case in point.

Lindsay
 

ewald

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Harmen - I am mainly interested here in exploring the idea that many of the original characters in the Zhouyi, were actually ideographic, that is depicting something very much related to their meaning.
 

lindsay

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You guys make it all sound so simple. Here are a couple of additional aspects to think about. During Shang times, there were large populations in and around Shang and Zhou who were not Chinese and did not speak Chinese. In fact, some scholars think the Chinese were a minority population in China at the time. Where do you think all those captives came from who are mentioned in the OBI? What do you think "clearing the land" means in the Shang king's OBI divinations? Not tree stumps, I think. Another thing to consider is that alternate non-character scripts have also been found in Bronze Age archaeolgical sites, writing that does not resemble Chinese as we know it and which cannot now be read. Finally, there have been very interesting contemporary finds from regions like Sichuan, an large area that was apparently illiterate but had a very high degree of civilization and culture, possibly on the same level as Shang. Most scholars admit they have no clue how Sichuan fits into the picture, although theories abound. The point: The world which saw the birth of the Zhouyi was much more complex and diversified than most of us imagine. There were doubtless significant non-Chinese influences we cannot even guess at. We know the Chinese rewrote their history again and again over hundreds of years, and most of us buy the end result uncritically. It might be useful to think outside the Chinese box.

Lindsay
 
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hmesker

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Lindsay,

I am 100% aware that things are not simple. But you work with what you have, and the Zhouyi is unmistakably written in Chinese, so that is what you use. The references that we find in the Yi seem to refer to Zhou or Shang culture, or at least to a literate society. The fact that the Yi talks about 'finding allies in the West or South, losing allies in the North or East' could also be an indication of the location of origin of the Yi. The book by Li Feng talks a great deal about the wars and struggles the Zhou had with other states. You need to have a good picture of the land and its occupants to be able to judge the products of that time, but you work with what you have, and what we mainly have are bronze inscriptions, oracle bones, and the remaining literature. No doubt that other societies existed, independent of the Zhou, but they were from areas that were virtually closed-off and therefore they hardly had any impact on the growth of the Chinese culture at that time.
I am aware that the Chinese rewrote their history, but because the many bronzes with inscriptions that are found were cast on special commemorative occasions, I do believe they give a fairly - although biased - account of a real event, which can be matched with stories in existing literature. I am not sure if this all helps in understanding the language of the Yi, but I do believe it helps to put it all in a (narrow) perspective.

Harmen.
 

lindsay

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Harmen -

Yes, of course, you are right. What else can we do? But the archaeology is very exciting, and in the end, our whole picture of Shang/Zhou may change a lot. I don't think the various areas were necessarily as isolated as you suggest. Did you know, for example, that a Shang OBI was found inscribed on a whale scapula? They didn't pull that baby out of the Yellow River.

Lindsay
 
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hmesker

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lindsay said:
I don't think the various areas were necessarily as isolated as you suggest. Did you know, for example, that a Shang OBI was found inscribed on a whale scapula? They didn't pull that baby out of the Yellow River.
A whale? My god, why didn't 綠色和平 intervene?!

No kidding Lindsay, that is amazing. I wonder how it ended up in Anyang (if that was the place were they found it, most OB's were found there). I would like to read more about it, do you know of sources which tell about this find?

Best,

Harmen.
 

lindsay

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Hi Harmen -

A lot of what I was thinking about comes from a book I've been reading called "The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600" by Valerie Hansen (W. W. Norton: New York, 2000).

Valerie Hansen is a Professor of Chinese History at Yale University. Here is her academic website: http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/hansen.html

On page 36 of "Open Empire" is the following paragraph:

"One of many peoples vying for power in China at the time, the Shang commanded forces numbering in the thousands - as many as thirteen thousand in one campaign, according to some sources - and they took prisoners in even larger numbers, one oracle bone claiming thirty thousand.(11) The seemingly innocent queries about clearing land in the oracle bones may actually refer to Shang conquest of nomadic peoples whose land had to be cleared. The oracle bones further record that other peoples submitted tribute to the Shang king in the form of horses, dogs, and cattle. Indeed, many of the scapulas and turtle shells the Shang used for prognostication came from outside Shang territory. Even a whale scapula has been found in Anyang, a hint that the people who originally found it lived beyond the landlocked Shang territory. Other rare animals found at Anyang include elephants, monkeys, and rhinoceri, evidence that the climate in ancient times was both warmer and wetter than today. Their presence reminds us that the people of the Shang lived along the Yangzi River in a small but fertile band of wetlands near green forests inhabited by these tropical animals. It is possible that the climate of north China was slightly warmer and wetter than it is today, further facilitating the cultivation of agricultural crops."

Footnote 11: K. C. Chang, "Shang Civilization", 194.

Now this is the kind of writing that drives scholars crazy. On the one hand, you have to assume Valerie Hansen is a reliable historian using well-documented sources. On the other hand, you have no idea where she is getting her information. Glancing at her footnotes for the chapter, I see David N. Keightley, K. C. Chang, David Hawkes, Edward L. Shaughnessy, Michael Loewe, Robert Bagley, Bernhard Karlgren, William H. Nienhauser, Stephen Owen, Arthur Waley, Lothar von Falkenhausen. The usual suspects. I have no idea where she got the whale scapula at Anyang, but it jumped off the page when I read it. If I had to guess, I'd look in K. C. Chang's "Shang Civilization", but I do not own or have access to the book. Shang history is not Hansen's specialty, so she's probably relying on standard sources. But finding the right source would be like finding a needle in a ... supertanker full of hay.

Harmen, if you really want to know about the whale scapula, just send Hansen an email and ask her. That could save you hundreds of scholar-hours (as Brad likes to say).

Lindsay
 
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hmesker

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Thanks for the info Lindsay, much appreciated. I will contact Hansen.
I skimmed through Shang Civilization by K.C. Chang, but could not find a reference to the whale scapula. But I did find something totally different which intruiges me:

(...) Wang Hai, a predynastic ancestor of the Shang, is credited in 'Shih pen' with being the originator of cattle breeding, and Wang-Kuo-wei characterized him as a true cultural hero who civilized Shang people. 'Yi ching' mentions his death at the hands of the Yu Yi Shih, a northern tribe, probably as a result of a dispute over grazing grounds.
(p. 144)

For the source of last sentence Chang points to Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 his 周易卦爻辭中的故事. But the story does not ring a bell to me, and I wonder which hexagram he refers to. I'll try to find Gu's book, which, if I'm correct, is from the 1930's but still available as a part of collected works by Gu Jiegang.

Anyway, I am taking a forum break now. See/read you guys later.

Best,

Harmen.
 

denis_m

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Hello Harmen,

The 周易經傳朔源 by 李學勤 discusses 顧頡剛's research on Wang Hai. Hexagram #34.4 touches on the Wang Hai story, with reference to losing one's herd at a place called Yi易 (or 有易). Zhu Xi believes the word 易 should be emended to 場 [the open range]. Gu says that 4th and 6th lines of 56 also relate to Wang Hai's history.

Thanks for sharing your work in your postings and blog.

Denis Mair
 
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hmesker

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Hi Denis,

Thanks, now you mention the place Yi I remember it. I have ordered the 古史辨 which contains 顧頡剛 his famous article and more, I am interested in his Zhouyi studies. Although most of his work is already summed up by Rutt, Shaughnessy and others I like to read (if that is possible with my limited knowledge of Chinese) the original material when possible.

Bye for now.

Harmen.
 

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