h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone on here familiar with the Chinese writing system?

Came across something odd whilst browsing the web (now, there's a shock!!) which was claiming support for biblical Gensis from Chinese characters. Never mind what you think of the idea (and I'm sure most can guess mine so I shan't bother either!), I'm interested in their method and whether it makes sense. I.e. can you interpret/use chinese characters as follows?

they claim:

symbols for 2 trees and a woman = to covet -encapsulated in the Chinese language (ie they get their word for 'covet' from things covetted(!?))

The Chinese word for ‘first’ embodies the statement that God made Man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into him. With the characters ‘life’, ‘dust’ and ‘man’ we read ‘first’ in Chinese. (again, implying they get their word for first from the first human created)

Put the character for ‘two’ with the character for ‘persons’ and we have the word ‘beginning’. (etc)

The word Create: dust + life or motion + mouth or person = speak + walk = create (etc)

I.e. can you take the chinese characters and split them up like this? Can, for example from above, the symbol/s for 'first' be meaningfully deconstructed as above or is it just coincidence?
It seems to be taking the (dunno the correct terms here) european way of constructing some words and applying it to Chinese. So words like 'television' (and yes that is a deliberate choice) can be deconstructed to find their meaning.

Whereas 'Message' has nothing to do with untidyness or time.

Oooh! I know nothing about chinese lettering, but I like the sound of this. Another one it'll be virtually impossible to prove or disprove!

true enough. Just to reassure anyone who might be not sure about replying due to the nature of the claim presented, I am not looking for a discussion on the rights and wrongs of the religious side of this.

I just wanted to clarify whether this approach was valid for chinese writing - it is not preparatory to using that in further discussion here of the rights and wrongs of their idea (although I may use it elsewhere if this comes up - but it seems pretty far out so should be fairly safe )

It seems reasnably random, yet pleasingly coincdidental.

Hm, wish I knew a fluent chinese speaker who would like to expand on this!

I don't know Chinese words at all, but yes, some of their their pictograms are built up from simpler forms. Not all of them though.

but my understanding (little though it is) is that one pictogram != one meaning. So saying it has x/y/z symbol therefore means X doesn't hold?

These examples are all new to me, but I have heard that the idiogram (?) for "flood" is built up from "eight people in a boat". This is probably nonsense.

TRiG.

I'm not exactly an expert on Chinese writing, but it is true that some of their more complex characters are made up of combinations of simpler characters. The same is true in Japanese.

For some examples, see point 3 under 'Categories of Chinese Characters' here: http://www.friesian.com/yinyang.htm

Gif

that would seem to confirm that the symbols represent a number of different words or concepts, albeit related by various means. Thus, presumably, the actual meaning is only determined by context and use?

surely plenty of our words are from roots that could be 'read into' or made up of more than one word that have different meanings/roots?

Does the chinese system outdate christianity?

Not sure about that. The clearest (sorry) example is the symbols for sun and moon, when joined together forming bright.

They each express a word individually, but when combined, form a part of a seperate, but following or related concept.

"Thus, presumably, the actual meaning is only determined by context and use?"

A bit like the syllables in English, perhaps?

Unfortunately, there will always be differences, due to the mental differences in the way the different languages are expressed.

"A bit like the syllables in English, perhaps?"
hmmm, well, bit like words and word fragments. The syllables in english are often meaningless on their own.

As it happens, I have a degree in Modern Standard Chinese.

The idea that Chinese characters are built from components to tell a small story is more or less correct. The idea that this has anything at all to do with any non-Chinese belief system is, of course, complete crap. The word for 'first', for instance, is simply a character indicating an ordinal function followed by a horizontal line. It has nothing to do with 'dust' or 'man' or 'invisible sky pixie'.

The stories that *are* there are interesting enough without inventing things. Personally, I find it fascinating that the character for 'ocean' consists of a picture of a sheep (seen face-on) and a water radical - this indicates that the character sounds like the word for sheep but has something to do with water, so obviously the word is 'ocean'. ('Sheep' and 'ocean' are homonyms, you see.)

Some other characters are slightly more obvious. The concept of 'peace' is shown by a kneeling subservient woman under a roof. The concept of 'discord' is a group of three women...

*thinks: I'll get lynched*

I know that there aren´t tenses in the verbal system, they use markers next to the verb.

Thatprat, I have another "version" for bright: three suns over the line of the horizon. Maybe It is just a nuance of brightness, like shining, sparkling...

The ideogram sun has evolved from a synthetic simple drawing of a sun. It was like that in the 19th C BC,(?) and now it is like a rounded square with a small tick on the only straight line of the ideogram.

What I find most interesting is the posibility of conveying a lot of information using little space.

ANd to show that it's Friday night and my rational neurons are off:

... about poetry... how can metaphors be expressed? Surely they do it, but how?

***
Ivan, why subservient?
Oh! it's too late, I'll lynch you any other day.

'Subservient' because that is the traditional role of a woman in Chinese society. By contrast, the character for 'male' is made up of the character for 'power' and a representation of agricultural land.

cheers for the input Ivan, interesting to know.

Yes

It seems that any language "manage" to express the dominant ideology pretty well.

In Spanish we have zorro (fox) used for a cunning man, while zorra is used to insult a woman, a synonym of whore.

there are a few more.

Well, no idea about the bible stuff, but I went to school with a Chinese girl in the year above, and she did say that Chinese is so difficult because yes the symbol for a woman and the symbol for a house is translated to English as 'contentment' or something similar.

It was a long time ago so that might not be quite right. She told me because she wrote my name for me in Chinese letters and I thought if I knew them all I could write Chinese. Well, I was only 14.

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Although the grammar and vocabularly are different, Japanese uses Chinese characters together with phonetic Japanese ones, and Japanese people can understand Chinese characters.

In Japanese there are two characters used for "Ichi" (meaning One), the most common is a simple horizontal line but the other, used mainly for legal documents and official forms is a compund character, the top half of which (known as the radical) is the same as the character for Mud or Clay and the bottom half could be slightly modified to look like the charatcer meaning Transform or Change Into, although I'm not sure that that is where it actually comes from; but it's the simpler form that is normally used to write "Ichiban" (First)and the second character that combines with it doesn't look anything like the character for Man but maybe in Chinese they use a different combination, I don't know.