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bǎixìng

bǎixĂŹng (bǎi·xĂŹng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] ç™Ÿć§“) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) 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:

📖 📄 📘 ZhĂ nhuǒ (ZhĂ n·huǒ War · Fire → [Flames of War] 战火 戰火) WĂșqĂ­ng (WĂș·qĂ­ng {Not Having} · Feeling → [Being Heartless] 无情 ç„Ąæƒ…), ShĂ©i (Who 谁 èȘ°) LĂĄi ({Will Come} 杄 䟆) ZhěngjiĂč ({to Save} æ‹Żæ•‘) WĂșgĆ« (WĂș·gĆ« Without · Guilt → [Innocent] 无蟜 ç„ĄèŸœ) de (’s 的) BǎixĂŹng (Bǎi·xĂŹng {Hundred → [All]} · Surnames → [Common People] ç™Ÿć§“)?

This week’s MEotW is the last word in the above Mandarin title, “bǎixĂŹng (bǎi·xĂŹng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] ç™Ÿć§“)”, 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?

“BǎixĂŹng (Bǎi·xĂŹng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] ç™Ÿć§“)” 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: é»„ćžæ—), Yandi tribes (Chinese: ç‚Žćžæ—), 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]]] 癟)” in “bǎixĂŹng (bǎi·xĂŹng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] ç™Ÿć§“)” is used to effectively mean “all”, like it does in “bǎiwĂč (bǎi·wĂč {hundred → [all]} · things 癟物)”. A similar expression is “wĂ nwĂč (wĂ n·wĂč {ten thousand → [all]} · things 䞇物 èŹç‰©)”, in which “wĂ n ({ten thousand} [→ [all; a very great number of]] 侇 èŹ/侇)”, 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, “bǎixĂŹng (bǎi·xĂŹng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] ç™Ÿć§“)” is now also used to refer to the common people of other nations as well.

The Book of Family Surnames

The expression “bǎixĂŹng (bǎi·xĂŹng {hundred → [all]} · surnames → [common people | all existing surnames] ç™Ÿć§“)” is apparently referenced in the title of the classic Chinese text Bǎijiā XĂŹng ((Bǎi·jiā {Hundred → [Many; Various; All]} · Families’ ç™Ÿćź¶) (XĂŹng Surnames 槓) → [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: ç™Ÿćź¶ć§“), 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 ÊŒPhags-pa script
Creative Commons Public Domain logo
An example of the Chinese poem “Hundred Family Surnames” written in Chinese characters and in ÊŒPhags-pa script (For more information on the ÊŒPhags-pa script, see the MEotW post on “cuĂČ ({[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 QĂ­n ShǐhuĂĄng ((QĂ­n {Qin (dynasty)} 秊) (Shǐ·huĂĄng Beginning · Emperor 構皇) (the founder of the QĂ­n 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 XĂŹng ((Bǎi·jiā {Hundred → [Many; Various; All]} · Families’ ç™Ÿćź¶) (XĂŹng Surnames 槓) → [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

HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn

HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn (Armageddon ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šéĄż ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šé “) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) 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:

📖 📄 📘 HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn (Armageddon ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šéĄż ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šé “) DĂ zhĂ n (Dà·zhĂ n {Big → [Great]} · War ć€§æˆ˜ ć€§æˆ°) HuĂŹ (Will 䌚 會) zĂ i (in 朹) YǐsĂšliĂš (Israel 仄è‰Č戗) BĂ ofā (BĂ o·fā Explode · {Issue Forth} → [Erupt] 爆揑 爆癌) ma ([? ptcl for “yes/no” questions] 搗 旎)? ShĂšngjÄ«ng (ShĂšng·jÄ«ng (the) Holy · Scriptures → [the Bible] ćœŁç» 聖經) de (’s 的) Guāndiǎn (Guān·diǎn {Looking At → [View]} · Point → [Viewpoint] 观ç‚č 觀點) ShĂŹ (Is æ˜Ż) ShĂ©nme (ShĂ©n·me What · [suf] 什äčˆ ä»€/甚éșŒ)?

This week’s MEotW is “HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn (Armageddon ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šéĄż ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šé “)”, 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”??? đŸ€·đŸ»).

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 “äșș”, “揣”, â€œć±±â€, 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 “HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn (Armageddon ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šéĄż ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šé “)” 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 Technology Theocratic

bĂ ogĂ o

bĂ ogĂ o (bĂ o·gĂ o reporting · telling → [reporting; making known | report; speech; lecture; talk] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) 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 a news item with the following headline:

English:

Adjustments to Field Service Reporting

Mandarin:

📖 📄 📘 GuānyĂș (Guān·yĂș {Closing → [Relating]} · to 慳äșŽ 關斌) TiĂĄnxiě (TiĂĄn·xiě {Filling Out} · Writing 楫憙 楫毫) ChuĂĄndĂ o (chuĂĄn·dĂ o Spreading · Way → [Preaching] 䌠道 悳道) BĂ ogĂ o (BĂ o·gĂ o Reporting · Telling → [Report] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊) de (’s 的) GǎibiĂ n (Changings æ”č揘 æ”čèźŠ)

This week’s MEotW, “bĂ ogĂ o (bĂ o·gĂ o reporting · telling → [reporting; making known | report; speech; lecture; talk] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊)”, is used above to mean “report”.

Telling Reports

The “bĂ o (reporting; announcing; declaring [→ [newspaper; periodical; bulletin; report]] | reply; respond; reciprocate | recompensing; repaying; requiting [→ [revenge; retribution | reward]] 抄 ć ±)” in “bĂ ogĂ o (bĂ o·gĂ o reporting · telling → [reporting; making known | report; speech; lecture; talk] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊)” basically means “reporting”. Unsurprisingly, it also makes an appearance in “bĂ ozhǐ (bĂ o·zhǐ reporting · paper → [newspaper] 抄çșž 栱玙)”, the Mandarin word for “newspaper”, and it can even be used as an abbreviation for that word and mean “newspaper” all by itself.

The “gĂ o (tell; inform; notify; explain | accuse; sue; {take sb. to court} | {ask for}; request 摊)” in “bĂ ogĂ o (bĂ o·gĂ o reporting · telling → [reporting; making known | report; speech; lecture; talk] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊)” means “telling” in this context, and it’s also the “gĂ o (tell; inform; notify; explain | accuse; sue; {take sb. to court} | {ask for}; request 摊)” in the well-known expression “gĂ osu (tell ć‘ŠèŻ‰ ć‘ŠèšŽ)”.

While “bĂ ogĂ o (bĂ o·gĂ o reporting · telling → [reporting; making known | report; speech; lecture; talk] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊)” can be used as a verb, and while both of its morphemes are basically verbs, “bĂ ogĂ o (bĂ o·gĂ o reporting · telling → [reporting; making known | report; speech; lecture; talk] æŠ„ć‘Š 栱摊)” can also be used as a noun, as it is in the above-quoted headline. In such cases, it’s a verbal noun, or a gerundial noun.

Changing Technologies

Technologies? What technologies? Weren’t we just talking about field service reports? Well, what’s a technology, actually? Does it necessarily involve digital electronics? The article “PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) Was Plan A” touches on this basic question of what a technology is:

The word “technology” comes from the Greek words tekhnē (skill) and logiā (from logos, meaning word, speech), so at its root a technology is a set of words or speech (and thus the thoughts they represent) about a certain kind of skill—“skill speech”.

And what is a skill? A skill can be defined as a “capacity to do something well; technique, ability”. So, at root, a technology—a set of “skill speech”—involves a set of thoughts about a technique or an ability to do something, and hopefully, do it well.

How does that relate to field service reports? Well, field service reports are designed to have the ability to do something, are they not? In the case of field service reports, they are designed to enable the passing on of the information that the organization considers to be worth having about the field service activity of individual publishers. Since they are constructs designed to have the ability to do something, it can be said that field service reports are a technology, and if life in the modern era has taught us anything, it’s that technologies change as people keep searching for better and better ways of doing things. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that field service reports occasionally change, just like other technologies do.

Advancing Cultural Technologies

As Mandarin field language learners, it may benefit us to consider what the above-quoted article goes on to say about technologies:

Thus, it would be appropriate to think of writing systems, and even languages themselves, as cultural technologies. (Interestingly, they are technologies, or sets of “skill speech”, involving speech itself, and thus they are of basic, foundational importance to any and all other technologies, or sets of “skill speech”.) As cultural technologies, languages like Mandarin and writing systems like the HĂ nzĂŹ and PÄ«nyÄ«n should be allowed and encouraged to progress, like other technologies are allowed and encouraged—expected, in fact—to progress for the benefit of all and not remain stagnant.

Yes, like the newspapers mentioned above have had to adapt to remain relevant as cultural technologies, it would be good for cultural technologies like languages and writing systems to continue to adapt and progress as well, so that those of us who use them can continue to benefit from them as much as we should be able to.

So, when it comes to field service reports, Chinese characters, or anything else related to our service to Jehovah, rather than indulging in nostalgia and clinging to the past, we should cultivate this attitude that the Bible advocates at Philippians 3:13, 14:


Forgetting the things behind and stretching forward to the things ahead, I am pressing on toward the goal for the prize