Tag: Morphemes

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pĂștao

pĂștao (grape è‘Ąè„) đŸ‘ˆđŸŒ Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

As part of a series of posts about some common myths about Chinese characters, this post discusses the Monosyllabic Myth. So, this week’s MEotW is pĂștao (grape è‘Ąè„)”, since the very existence of this simple, well-known Mandarin word, with its two inseparable syllables that together express a single meaning, handily disproves this myth.

A bunch of grapes hanging on a vine

Creative Commons Public Domain logo Michael Pardo [source]

Monosyllabic?

In the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linguist and sinologist John DeFrancis thus introduces the chapter entitled “The Monosyllabic Myth”:

“In this language there is neither an alphabet nor any definite number of letters, but there are as many characters as there are words or expressions.” So said the sixteenth-century Catholic missionary Michele Ruggieri, one of the first Westerners to undertake what he called the “semi-martyrdom” of studying Chinese (quoted in Bernard 1933:149). Ruggieri’s views were similar to those of his superior, Father Matteo Ricci, as paraphrased by Father Nicola Trigault, who also transmitted the opinion that in Chinese “word, syllable, and written symbol are the same” and that the words “are all monosyllabic; not even one disyllabic or polysyllabic word can be found” (Trigault 1615:25-26).

Even these early observations reveal one of the main reasons for the confusion leading to the Monosyllabic Myth—namely, the failure to distinguish between speech and writing. It is the despair of linguists, who insist on keeping the two apart, that they have so little success in achieving their aim and hence must do incessant battle against the practice of using an observation about writing to reach a conclusion about speech.

Just as with the Emulatability Myth, it seems that missionaries of Christendom were involved in spreading the Monosyllabic Myth, the erroneous idea that each Chinese character represents a one-syllable word. Yes, the list of erroneous ideas that Christendom has been involved in spreading is certainly a long one!

As for speech and writing, the article “PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) Was Plan A” says the following about their relative importance:

Jehovah built right into us the specialized equipment we need to directly produce speech, but we can only produce writing indirectly through the general purpose tools that are our hands, which generally must do so using external, man-made tools and media such as pens and keyboards and paper and computer screens. If even us humans can design and build things with screens that can dynamically display writing, then Jehovah certainly could have designed our bodies to be able to do so as well, but he didn’t. Instead, Jehovah himself designed our bodies so that “speech is primary, writing secondary”.

Chinese Characters, Chinese Speech, and Monosyllabism

Having reminded us of the important distinction between speech and writing when it comes to any human language, including Mandarin, DeFrancis goes into some detail about how the views of many about Chinese writing and about Chinese speech have contributed to the pervasiveness of the Monosyllabic Myth:

MONOSYLLABISM DERIVED FROM WRITING

In alphabetic writing systems such as English the separation of graphic units by white space, a relatively late development in the history of writing (Gelb 1963:19), is a popular means of defining a word despite the somewhat haphazard way in which many of the demarcations came about. In Chinese the fact that the characters in a running text are normally set off from each other by the same amount of space between adjacent characters regardless of how closely they may be tied together in meaning is also an important factor in defining characters as words.

It is individual characters that form the basis for dictionary entries. Each character is provided with a dictionary listing which gives its pronunciation, consisting always of a single syllable, and its meaning, which may be single or multiple. The conventional dictionary pronunciation of a character does not always correspond with the sound in speech that the syllable is supposed to represent. 


A more serious objection to the handling of characters in ordinary dictionaries involves semantics. Each character is presented as an independent unit and is defined as having at least one meaning. The assumption that each character represents an independent meaningful syllable leads to the conclusion that each character represents a monosyllabic word.

MONOSYLLABISM SURMISED FROM SPEECH

The notion of monosyllabism derived from the writing system is further reinforced by the generally held view of Chinese speech. The syllable in Chinese is often considered phonologically distinct in that it is more rigidly determined than is the case in many other languages, such as English. Chinese syllables, with some exceptions that can be disregarded here, are invariant in the sense that they do not undergo the kind of internal change exhibited by English man-men, his-him, love-loved. In itself this is not a particularly distinctive or particularly significant feature. It has, however, helped to create a situation in which “the syllable is accorded a special status in Chinese
as a psychological unit” (Arlotto 1968:521). The syllable is held to be the type of unit between phoneme and sentence that in English is called a “word” (Chao 1968a:136). Since the syllable is represented by a character, the latter too is held to represent a word. The equating of syllable with character, the notion that both represent a word, and the fact that each individual character, and hence each individual syllable attached to it, has individual meaning, all combine to characterize both speech and writing as “monosyllabic.”

Commenting on the extent to which the Monosyllabic Myth has spread because of factors such as those mentioned above, DeFrancis speaks of

the popular view that the syllable always has meaning and is not a mere morpheme [e.g., the “er” in “teacher”] but a full-fledged word.

He goes on to say:

The popular misconception of the Chinese speaking entirely in words of one syllable is reinforced by some specialists who exaggerate
either because they lack
understanding or because in the interest of popularization they oversimplify to the point of error.

Sweet Grapes

Providing a well-known example of a Mandarin word which definitely has more than one syllable, DeFrancis discusses “pĂștao (grape è‘Ąè„)”, this week’s MEotW:

Assiduous scholarly research may sometimes succeed in tracing the provenance of a specific term, such as pĂștao (“grape”). The usual dictionary handling of this term, similar to that for “butterfly,” presents a two-character expression meaning “grape” under both the character è‘Ą (pĂș) defined as “grape” and the character 萄 (tao) also defined as “grape.” In fact, however, the two syllables are inseparable and meaningless in themselves. They actually constitute a phonetic loan derived from an Iranian word *badag(a) that entered into Chinese when the grapevine was brought back from Ferghana in Central Asia by the Chinese general Zhang Qian in 126 B.C. (Chmielewski 1958). This precise dating of the origin of a disyllabic expression in Chinese further illustrates how misleading is the dictionary procedure that gives independent meanings for each of the characters used to write the two syllables in such terms.

Not Created Equal

It’s true that in the Chinese characters writing system, each character represents a Mandarin syllable. However, all Mandarin syllables are not created equal. DeFrancis gives us a breakdown about the different types of Mandarin syllables:

There are thus three types of Chinese syllables:

1. F: free, meaningful
2. SB: semibound, meaningful
3. CB: completely bound, meaningless

These three categories are roughly comparable in English to the free form teach, the semibound form er in “teacher” and “preacher,” and the completely bound forms cor and al in “coral.” The first two categories are morphemes, the third is not, as is the case also with their counterparts in Chinese.




A random sample of two hundred characters reveals the following distribution:

44% free (includes 7% literary)
45% semibound
11% completely bound
100%

So, while the Monosyllabic Myth holds that “each character represents a monosyllabic word”, the reality is that, as shown above, fewer than half of characters stand on their own as free, monosyllabic words—the rest are bound as components of multisyllable words. DeFrancis goes on to share what Zhƍu Yǒuguāng ((Zhƍu {Circumference; Circle (surname)} 摹 摹/週) (Yǒu·guāng Has · Light æœ‰ć…‰) (Chinese linguist, etc., known as “the father of PÄ«nyÄ«n”)), who led the team that developed PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł), had to say on the matter:

Zhou Youguang, using a different corpus of characters than the approximately 4,800 of the Chao and Yang dictionary, and also perhaps having a different opinion as to whether a specific character is free or bound, says that “44 percent free is too much!” In his opinion, only 2,000 or so, or about 30 percent, of the 6,800 “modern standard characters” needed to write contemporary Chinese are free words (Zhou 1982:personal communication).

Where’s the Harm?

Is the Monosyllabic Myth merely of academic concern? Has it resulted in any real, practical harmful effects? Note how DeFrancis concludes his chapter on the Monosyllabic Myth:

HARMFUL ASPECTS OF “MONOSYLLABIC”

As in the case of the Ideographic Myth, the Monosyllabic Myth has fostered a kind of clichĂ© thinking about Chinese. Because of its application to both speech and writing it has helped to obscure the difference between the two. Moreover, it has distracted scholarly attention from pursuing certain meaningful lines of research, such as a closer examination of the possible relationship between speech and writing as revealed in China’s voluminous literature.

But the worst aspect of the myth is when it is taken up in a distorted version by the public at large, as for example by the illustrious and authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, in which “monosyllabic” is glossed as a philological term “used as the distinctive epithet of those languages (e.g., Chinese) which have a vocabulary wholly of monosyllables.”


For the impact of the term “monosyllabic” on the general public has been generally bad. The notion of speaking wholly in words of one syllable, or of reading and writing in the same fashion, in many minds carries with it a connotation of inadequacy and backwardness or at best of childish simplicity. 






This is unfortunate because, apart from denigrating a language and a script of enormous complexity and sophistication, it reveals our failure to get across to the public at large the idea that the real world of Chinese speech and writing is much more fascinating than the mythological world of Chinese monosyllabism.

Reverberations Beyond Characters

The Monosyllabic Myth about characters has even reverberated in the world of PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł), which some have insisted on writing as if each syl la ble was a sep a rate word, in slav ish de vo tion to the sup pos ed ly mon o syl lab ic na ture of the char ac ters.

At the other extreme, in their efforts to properly move past the erroneously perceived monosyllabism of the Chinese characters when they write PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł), some seem to have overcompensated for the Great Wall of spaceless, faceless, seemingly monosyllabic text written in characters by often smooshing multiple syllables together into long, unbroken, hard-to-read expressions. For example, some would write “dānyÄ«njiĂ©â€ as one continuous string.

However, breaking up long, multisyllable expressions with spaces or hyphens can often significantly improve readability, as in the case of “dān‐yÄ«njiĂ©â€ ((dān single 捕 於)‐(yÄ«n·jiĂ© sound · node; knot → [syllable] éŸłèŠ‚ 音節) → [monosyllabic | monosyllable]) compared to “dānyÄ«njiĂ©â€, “wĂčlǐ‐xué‐jiā” ((wĂč·lǐ things’ · {logic → [laws]} [→ [physics]] 物理)‐(xuĂ© studying ć­Š ć­ž)‐(jiā -ist 柶) → [physicist]) compared to “wĂčlǐxuĂ©jiā”, or “wĂč‐rĂč‐qĂ­tĂș” ((wĂč {by mistake}; mistakenly; {by accident} èŻŻ èȘ€/悞)‐(rĂč enter; {go into}; join ć…„)‐(qí·tĂș {fork; branch → [different; divergent | wrong]} · road; route; journey; way 歧途) → [go astray; be misled; take a wrong step in life]) compared to “wĂčrĂčqĂ­tĂș” or even “wĂčrĂč‐qĂ­tĂș”. So, PÄ«nyÄ«n (PÄ«n·yÄ«n {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] æ‹ŒéŸł) Plus material now often uses spaces and hyphens as appropriate to enhance readability when rendering multisyllable Mandarin expressions, especially those with three or more syllables.

Anyway, to conclude, the Monosyllabic Myth about Chinese characters is
BUSTED!

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HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn

HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn (Armageddon ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šéĄż ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šé “) đŸ‘ˆđŸŒ 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.]

[As part of a series of posts about some common myths about Chinese characters, this reposting of the post on “HāmǐjĂ­duƍdĂčn (Armageddon ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šéĄż ć“ˆç±łć‰ć€šé “)” discusses the Ideographic Myth.]

[The first time this post was posted], 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 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. ^

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lǐngxiĂč

lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–) đŸ‘ˆđŸŒ 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, with the 2024 United States presidential election looming, jw.org was featuring the article “Which Leader Will You Choose?—What Does the Bible Say?”. The Mandarin version of this article uses this week’s MEotW, “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)”, to translate the English word “leader”. For example:

English:

The Bible explains that God has appointed a most capable and trustworthy leader: Jesus Christ.

Mandarin:

📖 📄 📘 ShĂšngjÄ«ng (ShĂšng·jÄ«ng (the) Holy · Scriptures → [the Bible] ćœŁç» 聖經) shuƍ (says èŻŽ èȘȘ/èȘŹ) ShĂ ngdĂŹ (ShĂ ng·dĂŹ Above’s · {Emperor → [God]} → [God] 侊澝) yǐjing (yǐ·jing already · {has gone through} ć·Č经 ć·Č經) wěirĂšn (wěi·rĂšn designating · {giving free reign to → [appointing]} 槔任) YēsĆ« (Jesus è€¶çšŁ 耶穌) JÄ«dĆ« (Christ ćŸș督) zuĂČ ({to be} 恚) LǐngxiĂč (Lǐng·xiĂč {Neck → [Collar]} · Sleeves → [Leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–), tā (he 他) shĂŹ (is æ˜Ż) zuĂŹ (most 最 最/㝡) xiĂĄnmĂ­ng (xiĂĄn·mĂ­ng capable · {bright → [understanding]} → [wise and capable] 莀明 èłąæ˜Ž) de (’s 的) tǒngzhĂŹzhě (tǒng·zhÏ·zhě {gathering together → [commanding]} · ruling · person → [ruler] 统æČ»è€… ç”±æČ»è€…), zhĂ­de (zhí·de worth · getting → [deserving of] ć€ŒćŸ—) xĂŹnrĂšn (xĂŹn·rĂšn {being believed} · {being given free reign → [being trusted]} 俥任).

Analyzing Mandarin words at the morpheme level often reveals useful and interesting information, but the morphemes in “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)” seem
odd, considering what they are taken to mean when put together. “Lǐng (neck [→ [collar] → [lead; usher | have jurisdiction over; be in possession of]] | receive; draw; get; take; accept | understand; comprehend; grasp 鱆 領)” has an original literal meaning of “neck”, from which an effective meaning of “collar” understandably emerged. Somehow, though, another effective meaning that emerged for this morpheme is “to lead; to usher (as in “usher guests into the room”)”. The other morpheme “xiĂč (sleeve | {tuck inside the sleeve} èą–/耎)” literally means “sleeve”, and does not have an effective meaning on its own that’s obviously related to leadership. How then, did the combination of these two morphemes end up effectively meaning “leader”?

“Clothes Make the Man”?

My mother was a schoolteacher in China, and when I asked her about this seemingly strange combination of morphemes, she said that she wasn’t totally sure about the why or how of it, but that a teacher of hers had explained that to the ancient Chinese, the collar and sleeves of a piece of clothing were the most important indicators of how fit for purpose that piece of clothing was. Thus (if that teacher was not just expressing a baseless personal opinion on the matter), it may be that “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)” effectively meaning “leader” is connected to the idea behind the English saying “clothes make the man”, that is, that one’s clothes send a message about what kind of person one is. Sometimes, for example, people are even nicknamed because of what they wear, like the redcoats and brownshirts of history, or the redshirts and browncoats of fiction. A possibly related factor is that on military uniforms especially, symbols of rank or status are often placed on the collar or sleeves or both. So, in old China, perhaps leaders were seen as those wearing clothing with certain kinds of collars or sleeves, resulting in “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)” (“collar sleeves”) becoming a Mandarin synecdoche referring to “leader”. (For comparison, a common English synecdoche is “suits”, which is used to refer to “businessmen”.)

Another possible explanation is that perhaps the piece of clothing in question in “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)” is a metaphor for the people as a whole, and that the collar and sleeves, being the parts of a piece of clothing that the Chinese were said to believe set the tone for it, thus represent the leader or leaders of the people. If any of you have any other information or ideas about why or how the morphemes in “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)” came to combine to mean “leader”, please share in the comments.

“The Emperors Have No Clothes”

Regardless of how the combination of “lǐng (neck [→ [collar] → [lead; usher | have jurisdiction over; be in possession of]] | receive; draw; get; take; accept | understand; comprehend; grasp 鱆 領)” and “xiĂč (sleeve | {tuck inside the sleeve} èą–/耎)” came to effectively mean “leader”, “lǐngxiĂč (lǐng·xiĂč {neck → [collar]} · sleeves → [leader] éą†èą– é ˜èą–)” does indeed mean that to today’s Mandarin-speakers—to them, however they do so, “collar” and “sleeves” do indeed combine to make “leader”. Unfortunately—to allude to another well-known English saying—the human Emperors of this world “have no clothes”—there is no real basis for the claims that they are worthy to be mankind’s leaders.

In contrast, Jehovah God has chosen Jesus as his King, and Jesus has shown himself to have real qualifications, far beyond those involving mere apparel and status symbols. While the world is embroiled in various struggles—from violent wars to comparatively nonviolent elections—over who will gain power to rule, it is our privilege to tell people in the Mandarin field about the good news about God’s Kingdom, and about God’s King, Jesus Christ himself. Being no mere figurehead, he and his Kingdom will “crush and put an end to” the human governments of Satan’s world and cause the whole earth to actually become the peaceful, secure paradise that God wants it be.—Daniel 2:44; 1 John 5:19; Matthew 6:10.