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bǎixìng

bǎixìng (bǎi·xìng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] 百姓) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to hide the “flashcard”. 📖 📄 📘 icons mean 📖 Reveal All, 📄 Reveal Advanced, and 📘 Reveal None re all the “flashcards” in the heading, paragraph, etc. that they are placed at the beginning of.]

With the deadly shooting wars now being fought in places like Israel and Ukraine, jw.org recently featured an article with the following title:

English:

Who Will Save the Civilians?—What Does the Bible Say?

Mandarin:

📖 📄 📘 Zhànhuǒ (Zhàn·huǒ War · Fire → [Flames of War] 战火 戰火) Wúqíng (Wú·qíng {Not Having} · Feeling → [Being Heartless] 无情 無情), Shéi (Who 谁 誰) Lái ({Will Come} 来 來) Zhěngjiù ({to Save} 拯救) Wúgū (Wú·gū Without · Guilt → [Innocent] 无辜 無辜) de (’s 的) Bǎixìng (Bǎi·xìng {Hundred → [All]} · Surnames → [Common People] 百姓)?

This week’s MEotW is the last word in the above Mandarin title, “bǎixìng (bǎi·xìng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] 百姓)”, which corresponds to “civilians”, or “common people”. And, as the Wikipedia page for this expression says:

The word “lao” (Chinese: 老; lit. ‘old’) is often added as a prefix before “baixing”.[source]

Origins?

“Bǎixìng (Bǎi·xìng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] 百姓)” literally means “hundred surnames”. Regarding how a hundred surnames came to represent the people of China, the above-mentioned Wikipedia article claims:

A confederation of tribes living along the Yellow River were the ancestors of what later became the Han ethnic group in China.[source][source] Several large tribes, including the Huangdi tribes (Chinese: 黄帝族), Yandi tribes (Chinese: 炎帝族), and the Yi tribes, formed an alliance that consisted of roughly 100 tribes. This alliance is the origin of the baixing () or the “hundred surnames.”

Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but 19 of these surnames are used by about half of the Han Chinese people. About 87% of the population shares 100 surnames.[source][source]

Logically, as the population of the grouping of tribes that eventually became China grew, for a time there were fewer than one hundred surnames, for a relatively brief time there were exactly one hundred surnames, and then there were over a hundred surnames. Whether the particular claim above about there having been about a hundred early tribes is accurate, somewhere along the line, the idea may have taken root that one hundred surnames were generally representative of the people of China, especially if it’s true, as claimed above, that a hundred surnames covers about 87% of China’s population.

Another possibility is that the “bǎi (hundred [→ [numerous; all [kinds of]]] 百)” in “bǎixìng (bǎi·xìng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] 百姓)” is used to effectively mean “all”, like it does in “bǎiwù (bǎi·wù {hundred → [all]} · things 百物)”. A similar expression is “wànwù (wàn·wù {ten thousand → [all]} · things 万物 萬物)”, in which “wàn ({ten thousand} [→ [all; a very great number of]] 万 萬/万)”, which literally means “ten thousand”, is used to mean “all”, or “a very great number of”.

Either way, as we can see from the above Mandarin jw.org article title, besides being used to refer to the common people of China, “bǎixìng (bǎi·xìng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] 百姓)” is now also used to refer to the common people of other nations as well.

The Book of Family Surnames

The expression “bǎixìng (bǎi·xìng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] 百姓)” is apparently referenced in the title of the classic Chinese text Bǎijiā Xìng ((Bǎi·jiā {Hundred → [Many; Various; All]} · Families’ 百家) (Xìng Surnames 姓) → [Hundred Family Surnnames/The Book of Family Names (classic Chinese text listing common Chinese surnames)]), which is the subject of the following summary from Wikipedia:

The Hundred Family Surnames (Chinese: 百家姓), commonly known as Bai Jia Xing,[source] also translated as Hundreds of Chinese Surnames,[source] is a classic Chinese text composed of common Chinese surnames. An unknown author compiled the book during the Song dynasty (960–1279).[source] The book lists 507 surnames.[source] Of these, 441 are single-character surnames and 66 are double-character surnames.[source] About 800 names have been derived from the original ones.[source]

In the dynasties following the Song, the 13th-century Three Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, and the 6th-century Thousand Character Classic came to be known as San Bai Qian (Three, Hundred, Thousand), from the first character in their titles. They served as instructional books for children,[source] becoming the almost universal introductory literary texts for students (almost exclusively boys) from elite backgrounds and even for a number of ordinary villagers.

An example of the Chinese poem “Hundred Family Surnames” written in Chinese characters and in ʼPhags-pa script
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An example of the Chinese poem “Hundred Family Surnames” written in Chinese characters and in ʼPhags-pa script (For more information on the ʼPhags-pa script, see the MEotW post on “cuò ({[is] alternating; staggered} [→ [[is] wrong; mistaken; incorrect; erroneous | missed | grinding; rubbing | moving to the side | mistake; error; blunder [→ [fault]]]] | {[is] interlocked and jagged} [→ [intricate]] 错 錯)”.)

Help for Dealing With the Easily-Offended?

Years ago, in the door-to-door work, I called on a Chinese man who had a double-character surname. Being a Chinese person who had grown up in Canada and who had not even heard of Qín Shǐhuáng ((Qín {Qin (dynasty)} 秦) (Shǐ·huáng Beginning · Emperor 始皇) (the founder of the Qín dynasty and the first emperor of China)) until I saw a movie about this remarkable historical figure when I was an adult, I was not familiar with the background of the relatively rare double-character surnames, so I innocently asked him about it. However, rather than being flattered by the interest and politely enlightening me, he chose to be offended that I didn’t know something about his background and culture that he had known since his childhood and just—unhelpfully—said something like, ‘Don’t you know about the history of China?’

Well, dear reader, after learning of Bǎijiā Xìng ((Bǎi·jiā {Hundred → [Many; Various; All]} · Families’ 百家) (Xìng Surnames 姓) → [Hundred Family Surnnames/The Book of Family Names (classic Chinese text listing common Chinese surnames)]) and the double-character surnames in it, perhaps you may be spared a similarly dreary experience in the ministry. (Since we seek to reach everyone in our territories, we can end up meeting all kinds of people, like Jesus did. Some of them may be proud, petty, and unpleasant, but then again, some of them may be sheeplike, hungry for the truth, and appreciative of our imperfect efforts.)

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Culture Current Events History Language Learning Names Science Technology

Hāmǐjíduōdùn

Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to hide the “flashcard”. 📖 📄 📘 icons mean 📖 Reveal All, 📄 Reveal Advanced, and 📘 Reveal None re all the “flashcards” in the heading, paragraph, etc. that they are placed at the beginning of.]

At the time of this writing, jw.org was featuring an article with the following title:

English:

Will Armageddon Begin in Israel?—What Does the Bible Say?

Mandarin:

📖 📄 📘 Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓) Dàzhàn (Dà·zhàn {Big → [Great]} · War 大战 大戰) Huì (Will 会 會) zài (in 在) Yǐsèliè (Israel 以色列) Bàofā (Bào·fā Explode · {Issue Forth} → [Erupt] 爆发 爆發) ma ([? ptcl for “yes/no” questions] 吗 嗎)? Shèngjīng (Shèng·jīng (the) Holy · Scriptures → [the Bible] 圣经 聖經) de (’s 的) Guāndiǎn (Guān·diǎn {Looking At → [View]} · Point → [Viewpoint] 观点 觀點) Shì (Is 是) Shénme (Shén·me What · [suf] 什么 什/甚麼)?

This week’s MEotW is “Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓)”, the Mandarin syllables of which were obviously chosen first because of how much they sound like the English word “Armageddon” (and perhaps the original Hebrew word from which that came), not because of the meanings of the supposedly ideographic Chinese characters used to write them out (“Exhale Rice Lucky Much Pausing”??? 🤷🏻).

This emphasizes to us that when it comes to human language, SPEECH is primary—SOUNDS are the primary medium for transmitting meaning, and a writing system that transmits meaning purely with its visual symbols, without any dependency on speech sounds, is not a thing. However, this erroneous concept is so prevalent that there’s a name for it: The Ideographic Myth.

Several past MEotW posts have mentioned in passing the Ideographic Myth concerning Chinese characters, so it’s about time this blog took a deeper dive into this subject. Below are some selected excerpts from the chapter “The Ideographic Myth”, of the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, by John DeFrancis, along with some commentary.

the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech

This is a definition of the concept of “ideographic” writing.

Aren’t Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren’t they an ideographic system of writing?

The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing…There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.

Indeed, Chinese characters are always used to represent some language’s speech, are they not? They can be used to represent the speech of multiple languages, but they are not used in any way in which they do not represent the speech of any language, are they? There are no Chinese characters that have no spoken pronunciation in any language, are there? So, while some may find the idea of Chinese characters being an ideographic writing system fascinating, in real-life, actual use, Chinese characters are a phonetic writing system representing a language’s speech sounds (which do the actual representing of meanings)—Chinese characters are not an ideographic writing system directly representing meanings.

Origin of the Myth

The concept of Chinese writings as a means of conveying ideas without regard to speech took hold as part of the chinoiserie fad among Western intellectuals that was stimulated by the generally highly laudatory writings of Catholic missionaries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

…

It was not acquaintance with Chinese but decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing following Napoleon’s conquests in North Africa that led to the coining of several expressions related to the ideographic idea.

…

Decipherment of this script had long been impeded by the notion that it was symbolic of ideas, particularly mystical or spiritual ones. It was not just the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone, with its bilingual text in three scripts (Hieroglyphic Egyptian, Demotic Egyptian, and Greek) that made this possible. As Gordon (1968:24) stresses: “The decipherment of Hieroglyphic Egyptian required the replacement of the deep-seated notion of symbolism by the correct view that the main (though not the only) feature of the script is phonetic.”

Champollion’s success in deciphering the Egyptian script was due to his recognition of its phonetic aspect.

…

The rebus idea seems obvious to us since we use it in children’s games, but it actually constitutes a stupendous invention, an act of intellectual creation of the highest order—a quantum leap forward beyond the stage of vague and imprecise pictures to a higher stage that leads into the ability to represent all the subtleties and precision expressible in spoken language. Writing is now directly, clearly, firmly related to language: to speech. If there was ever any question whether a symbol had a sound attached to it, this now receives a positive answer. In the earliest form known to us, the character for “wheat” was borrowed to represent the word “come” precisely because both were pronounced in the same way.

…

What is crucial is to recognize that the diverse forms perform the same function in representing sound. To see that writing has the form of pictures and to conclude that it is pictographic is correct in only one sense—that of the form, but not the function, of the symbols. We can put it this way:

QUESTION: When is a pictograph not a pictograph?

ANSWER: When it represents a sound.

The use of the pictograph for “wheat” to represent the homophonous word ləg (“come”) transformed the function of the symbol from pictographic depiction of an object to syllabic representation of a sound. This change in function has been the essential development marking the emergence of all true systems of writing, including Chinese.

Sinological Contribution to the Myth

The fact that some Chinese pictographs have not undergone a change in form parallel to the change in function has tended to obscure the significance of the change that did take place. As a result, the phonetic aspect of Chinese writing is minimized by many people, even specialists in the field.

…

The error of exaggerating the pictographic and hence semantic aspect of Chinese characters and minimizing if not totally neglecting the phonetic aspect tends to fix itself very early in the minds of many people, both students of Chinese and the public at large, because their first impression of the characters is likely to be gained by being introduced to the Chinese writing system via some of the simplest and most interesting pictographs…. Unless a determined effort is made to correct this initial impression, it is likely to remain as an article of faith not easily shaken by subsequent exposure to different kinds of graphs.

…

Myth vs. Reality

A limited number of pictographic or semantic characters…cannot be considered indicative of full systems of nonphonetic writing that can function like ordinary orthographies to express nearly everything we can express in spoken language. The fact is that such a full system of nonphonetic writing has never existed. The system of Chinese characters, the Sumerian, Accadian, and Hittite cuneiform systems, and the Egyptian hieroglyphic system were none of them complete systems of semantic writing.

How limited is the number of pictographic or semantic characters, like “人”, “口”, “山”, etc., as opposed to the number of characters with some phonetic component related to pronunciation? This table from p. 129 of the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy says that only about 3% of all Chinese characters are purely pictographic or semantic:

Table 7 Semantic Versus Phonetic Aspects of Chinese Characters, p. 129, _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_

This myth, it is apparent, exists in two aspects. Both must be rejected. The first is that the Chinese characters constitute an existing system of ideographic writing. This has been shown to be factually untrue. The second aspect is the validity of the ideographic concept itself. I believe it to be completely untenable because there is no evidence that people have the capacity to master the enormous number of symbols that would be needed in a written system that attempts to convey thought without regard to sound, which means divorced from spoken language. …But while it is possible for a writing system to have many individual “ideographs” or “ideograms”, it is not possible to have a whole writing system based on the ideographic principle. Alphabetic writing requires mastery of several dozen symbols that are needed for phonemic representation. Syllabic writing requires mastery of what may be several hundred or several thousand symbols that are needed for syllabic representation. Ideographic writing, however, requires mastery of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of symbols that would be needed for ideographic representation of words or concepts without regard to sound. A bit of common sense should suggest that unless we supplement our brains with computer implants, ordinary mortals are incapable of such memory feats.

Indeed, how many concepts or ideas exist, or could potentially come into existence as they get invented? That’s how many symbols an actual ideographic writing system would need to have. Obviously, even if such a system could be made to exist, it would be unusable by actual imperfect humans. Even Chinese characters, which “only” number somewhere over 100,000, are not numerous enough to be an actual ideographic writing system, and Chinese characters are already inhumanly complex and numerous.

Objections to the Term “Ideographic”

We need to go further and throw out the term itself.

…

Chinese characters represent words (or better, morphemes), not ideas, and they represent them phonetically, for the most part, as do all real writing systems despite their diverse techniques and differing effectiveness in accomplishing the task.

…

Both terms [“logographic” and “ideographic”] are inadequate and misleading because they fail to indicate that the process of getting from graph to word/morpheme involves the phonetic aspect of the latter and because this failure leaves the way open to the idea that we get from graph to word/morpheme by means of some nonphonetic, in a word, “ideographic”, approach. Only the adoption of some such term as “morphosyllabic”, which calls attention to the phonetic aspect, can contribute to dispelling the widespread misunderstanding of the nature of Chinese writing.

Chinese characters being a “morphosyllabic” writing system means that “each character is pronounced as a single syllable and represents a single morpheme”* (smallest unit of language SOUND with meaning)—a Chinese character does NOT bypass language sounds to directly represent an idea.

So, every time you hear in Mandarin a name like “Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓)” that came from another language, and is made up in Mandarin of syllables that make no sense except that they sound like the name in the original language, remember that the Ideographic Myth is just that—a myth!

As worshippers of the one true God Jehovah, we carefully avoid spiritual idolatry, realizing that no visible idol or image can be allowed to replace the invisible, almighty Spirit Jehovah as the object of our worship. Similarly, us Chinese field language learners must also carefully avoid the linguistic idolatry of considering visible Chinese characters to be direct representations of meaning in Chinese languages, when the truth is that in human languages, including Chinese languages, meaning is primarily transmitted via invisible speech.

 

* John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p. 125. ^

Categories
Culture Current Events History Language Learning Names Nations Science

Tǔ’ěrqí

Tǔ’ěrqí (Turkey 土耳其) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to hide the “flashcard”. 📖 📄 📘 icons mean 📖 Reveal All, 📄 Reveal Advanced, and 📘 Reveal None re all the “flashcards” in the heading, paragraph, etc. that they are placed at the beginning of.]

On February 6, 2023, strong earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria, resulting in tens of thousands of people being killed (over 36,000 at the time of this writing), tens of thousands being injured, and hundreds of thousands being left homeless. So, as of this writing, the article “Devastating Earthquakes Strike Turkey and Syria—What Does the Bible Say?” is being featured on jw.org, and this week’s MEotW is “Tǔ’ěrqí  (Turkey 土耳其)”, the Mandarin word for “Turkey”. Knowing this will help us in the Mandarin field as we hear about, talk about, and pray about Turkey in the time ahead.

Note that it is apparent that “Tǔ’ěrqí  (Turkey 土耳其)” was chosen to represent “Turkey” in Mandarin because of what it sounds like, not because of the meanings of the supposedly ideographic (representing meaning directly through visible symbols, bypassing speech) Chinese characters used to write it out (“Soil Ear It”??? 🤷🏻).

Some Related Mandarin Expressions

Here are some other Mandarin expressions from the above-mentioned article that should be useful to know regarding this situation:

  • Xùlìyà (Syria 叙利亚 敘利亞)
  • qiángzhèn (qiáng·zhèn strong; powerful · {quaking → [earthquake]} (abbr. for qiángliè dìzhèn) 强震 強震)
    • dà (big → [great] 大) dìzhèn (dì·zhèn earth·quake 地震)
  • wú‐jiā‐kě‐guī ((wú without 无 無/无)‐(jiā home 家)‐(kě {(that) can} 可)‐(guī {be returned to} 归 歸) → [homeless])
  • cǎnjù (cǎn·jù miserable; tragic · {theatrical work (drama, play, opera, etc.)} → [tragedy; calamity; disaster] 惨剧 慘劇)
  • ānwèi (ān·wèi calming · consoling; comforting 安慰)
    • 📖 📄 📘 “cì (gives 赐 賜) yíqiè (yí·qiè {one (whole)} · {corresponding (set of)} → [all] 一切) ānwèi (ān·wèi calming · comforting 安慰) de (’s 的) Shàngdì (Shàng·dì Above’s · {Emperor → [God]} → [God] 上帝).”—Gēlínduō Hòushū ((Gēlínduō Corinth 哥林多) (Hòu·shū Later · Book 后书 後/后書) → [2 Corinthians]) 1:3 (Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) WOL; Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus).

“Tofu-Dreg Projects”

Some have wondered why so many even relatively new buildings failed to withstand these earthquakes. One news report explains:

experts said there is a mountain of evidence — and rubble — pointing to a harsh reality about what made the quakes so deadly: Even though Turkey has, on paper, construction codes that meet current earthquake-engineering standards, they are too rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings crumbled.

Buildings being poorly constructed, whether or not earthquake-engineering standards exist, is unfortunately not uncommon in this old system of things. There is even a Mandarin expression with its own Wikipedia page that describes such buildings:

“Tofu-dreg project” (Chinese: 豆腐渣工程; pinyin: dòufuzhā gōngchéng) is a phrase used in the Chinese-speaking world to describe a poorly constructed building, sometimes called just “Tofu buildings”. The phrase was coined by Zhu Rongji, the former premier of the People’s Republic of China, on a 1998 visit to Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province to describe a poorly-built set of flood dykes in the Yangtze River.[source] The phrase is notably used referring to buildings collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake disaster.[source][source][source][source][source][source]

In China, the term tofu dregs (the pieces left over after making tofu) is widely used as a metaphor for shoddy work, hence the implication that a “tofu-dreg project” is a poorly executed project.[source]

As we look forward to the new world that will no longer have such natural disasters as these earthquakes, nor the man-made conditions that make them even more deadly, may we keep our brothers and sisters in the affected areas in our prayers to Jehovah, the only true God and the “God of all comfort”—John 17:3, 2 Corinthians 1:3.