Imagine that you are cornered at a social gathering when the subject matter of race will come up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both equally a levels of competition wherein a single attempts to outrun the other people and a visually identifiable group of men and women sharing widespread ancestry. It is no wonder that racism has been these kinds of an intractable concern in the Anglosphere the really word embodies a feeling of opposition amongst distinct peoples.
You promptly location a pal on the other side of the area simply because you recognize using a literal reading through of a vocabulary merchandise to explain the origins, evolution, and persistence of racism in the Anglosphere is wholly preposterous.
For Chinese speakers, nevertheless, this is a frustratingly typical expertise. The sheer novelty and exoticism of a character-primarily based Japanese language to most English visitors suggest these spurious dissections of Chinese terms can effortlessly be handed off as amazing sociolinguistic insight.
The nature of characters by themselves, and the typical but incorrect plan that they’re pictographs, would make this tempting. But most figures in Chinese consist of two—or more—elements: a semantic ingredient that relates to the meaning of the phrase and a phonetic one that suggests how it sounds. That phonetic ingredient has no partnership to its indicating. The word for “mother,” for instance, contains “horse” mainly because the term for horse is ma and so (pronounced a little bit in a different way) is the term for mother.
Toss in that quite a few factors have a number of meanings, and you get issues like proclaiming that a penguin is a “business goose.” (The element really indicates “stand up” it’s a tippy-toe goose.) On best of that, most phrases are produced up of several characters, for a range of explanations.
None of this stops glib overseas analysts from making grand declarations about the indicating of Chinese phrases based mostly on completely bogus linguistic premises with a hefty splash of Orientalism. I just simply call it phrenology for terms.
Phrenology was a pseudoscientific idea in the 19th and early 20th generations keeping that the form and framework of one’s head—and by extension, brain—reliably mirrored intellectual, ethical, and behavioral traits. It was very well-known in the United States for a long time, even gifting us text like “intellectual.” (People today with larger foreheads were a lot more intelligent than the low-browed, according to phrenologists.)
Phrenology for words and phrases, like the phrenology of the past, examines the mystic framework of figures and text on their own in an try to extract wider political and philosophical this means. It often smacks of Orientalism, with proponents implicitly positing that the character-based languages of the East run on some further, meta-semantic degree that seems inscrutable in distinction to the logic of alphabet-based languages in the West.
In an write-up on 1 Belt, One Road (now formally translated as the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI), the Economist reiterates an argument by the China scholar Eyck Freymann based on the infrastructure policy’s 4-character Chinese name. The Chinese identify 一带一路 (practically, “one belt, a single road”) resembles quite a few other four-character phrases, these types of as 一心一意 (“one heart, just one soul,” i.e., wholeheartedly) and 一夫一妻 (“one spouse, a person spouse,” i.e., monogamy). The Economist notes that four-character phrases “are frequent in Chinese and suggest harmony, harmony, and wholeness.”
The magazine even more surmises that the balanced, harmonious wholeness of Just one Belt, Just one Highway “would carry echoes of the historical thought of tianxia (actually, “all beneath heaven”), by which emperors ruled,” to the Chinese ear. Employing this tenuous hyperlink, Freymann and the Economist argue that the switch from One Belt, 1 Highway to BRI was not just for the reason that the former is clunky in English but for the reason that China is making an attempt to tone down the fanfare around its ambitious return to historic preeminence and conceal its true electric power.
Four-character phrases are indeed considerably from rare in Chinese, but most of them are anything but mystical.
I attempt to go to the dentist 一年一次 (“one 12 months, a single time,” i.e., annually). A person time on vacation, a taxi driver explained to me, unsolicited, that relationship was just 一男一女 (“one man, a person woman”), which felt a small bit pointed. I’ve witnessed a fast paced fishmonger limit clients by composing 一人一条 (“one human being, one fish”) on a chalkboard. Most likely A person Belt, One Street is mimicking these phrases, as well?
English attracts seriously from foreign phrases in the design of neologisms. Thus, we have “telephone,” the blend of the Greek words and phrases for “far” and “sound,” instead of the Chinese 电话, practically “electric” in addition “speech.” (The phrase was really coined by the Japanese and then re-borrowed into Chinese.) Folks seem to believe that considering that the two morphemes 电 and 话 are common text encountered in normal context (contrary to tele and cellphone), then Chinese people surely ought to be studying them practically.
But that is not how men and women parse language, except if you’re the kind of human being who refuses to seek the services of a babysitter for panic of crushing your important youngster.
Get the phrase for “compatriot,” 同胞, utilized by mainland Chinese (in a way occasionally regarded as somewhat patronizing) to refer to Taiwanese individuals. The term is pretty much the combination of “same” and “placenta, womb.” On this foundation, Conal Boyce of Century Higher education argues in the peer-reviewed Journal of Political Risk that the time period constitutes “further proof of a psychic illness that is constructed into the extremely bedrock of the tradition, so that all Chinese are joined at the hip by a shared Same‑Womb fetish that underpins their We‑Chinese fixation.”
An additional frequent case in point is for “safety” or “security,” 安全. The term is composed of the figures for “peace” and “total, finish.” David Shambaugh in his e-book China Goes Global: The Partial Power interprets the phrase as “complete tranquility,” which can help us have an understanding of why China apparently sights stability “in extra complete terms” than some others. The pretty concept and phrase rendered in Chinese, he writes, say “more about China’s inside get than exterior threats to safety,” in some way. The word, pronounced anquan in Conventional Mandarin, also exists in both equally Japanese, go through as anzen, and Korean, anjeon, but Shambaugh doesn’t lengthen the anecdote outside the house Chinese borders.
By significantly the most well-known target of Chinese phrase phrenology is the phrase for crisis, 危机. There is an whole Wikipedia entry on the Chinese word for crisis, in fact, because dating again to at the very least John F. Kennedy, Westerners have beloved to awe at the fact that the two constituent characters are “danger” plus “opportunity.” This is technically correct in the very same feeling that the opposite of professional-gress is Con-gress: It’s a selective interpretation of morphemes divorced from true etymology and is best remaining for a fortune cookie or motivational horoscope.
Phrenology for words even more echoes the as soon as stylish Sapir-Whorf check out of language and assumed. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, first formulated in the 1920s, posited that the contours of human languages specially condition speakers’ capacity to understand and understand the planet around them. In other words and phrases, how you speak and how you believe are inextricably joined. Word phrenologists choose this one particular step further more: How the persons discuss and how a condition acts are inextricably connected.
In a bold Substack letter, Bruno Maçaes, a previous Portuguese formal who writes frequently about China but does not examine Chinese, argues that Chinese phrases “operate devoid of the dualistic divide involving empirical actuality and a transcendental realm of language.”
This is nonsense, an English phrase which means “without sense.”
He cites the poet Ezra Pound when stating that whereas English can evidently philosophically construct the term “red” de novo, the “Chinese ideogram could possibly set jointly many red objects: the abbreviated shots of a rose, a cherry, iron rust and a flamingo.” Therefore for the Chinese, “red” is a mere concrete entity and “is not a philosophical design. It takes advantage of what all people is aware from actual encounter,” which is seemingly unique to Chinese.
This, Maçaes concludes, exhibits the “absence of metaphysics” that “continues to be a defining mark of contemporary Chinese lifetime and society.” This extends into politics: Fairly than fuss about really understanding what pink is, the Chinese only act out of a pragmatism that is reflected in their language. They are not caught up in metaphysics, and they really do not need to rationale far too substantially. Thus, Maçaes writes, in Xi Jinping’s July 2020 essay expounding on the definition of socialism with Chinese properties, “he under no circumstances tried to protect a series of propositions or doctrinal tenets. Socialism with Chinese attributes is merely the rule of the Chinese Communist Celebration.”
The Chinese term for crimson, 红, is actually just the radical for “silk” (糸) merged with a semiphonetic component (工).
Chinese term phrenology, to borrow an historic Anglo-Saxon proverb, misses the forest for the trees. It is a person issue to realize a word or phrase and rather another to have an understanding of it in its context, alternatively than fabricate whimsical arguments that just enable you flaunt your understanding of this kind of a cryptic and arcane tongue.