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It's a framed site that can be a pain to navigate, but it lets you "drill down" through combinations of pictographs, ideographs, etc., to analyze words. I've provided some URLs you can use to bypass their navigation system to study the etymology of the word "boat," but you may have to do things like right-click and open links in other tabs to make this work my way instead of going through their framed system.
Go to this page -- http://zhongwen.com/d/178/d238.htm -- where you should see the character for boat. Note that it says "boat [vessel] with phonetic." So far, it looks just like seebs and his USENET guy said. The right-hand half of the word is indeed a unified phonetic. Here's what you should see (you can't click to navigate on my image but you can click on the one at the site.)
So let's see where this phonetic comes from. On their page, click on that phonetic (or open the link associated with that phonetic - depending on how you visited this page, browser, etc.). This is what you should see:
Ouch. This stuff about drainage looks bad for the Noah's ark interpretation.
But... this is still just describing the phonetic, not its component parts. So click on the COMPONENT OF THE PHONETIC that we thought was "eight" to see where that takes you (or open the link associated with that phonetic - depending on how you visited this page). You'll see this:
Are we having fun yet? Perhaps someone should send an apology to AiG, eh?
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Last edited by npetreley; 20th August 2002 at 09:15 PM.
What's interesting, to me, is that the "phonetic" is drawn with a character which is clearly a ji, but the "up close" picture of it is clearly a ba. Since ji and ba are otherwise separate characters, this looks pretty confused.
So... it's quite possible that the character is often drawn with that component drawn in the way that '8' is drawn in modern Chinese.
On the other hand, *when the character was first formed*, it would have been using the older meaning, so it still *wasn't* an 8. This kills the "the Chinese knew all about Genesis" argument. We could still have the argument that God tweaked their etymology such that, thousands of years later when new meanings had been attached to some syllables, you'd be able to take part of a phonetic component and extract meaning from it.
On the other hand, at that point, we might as well acknowledge that you can do a pretty good job of extracting any creation myth you want from Chinese characters, so maybe Vishnu hid his story in there too.
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What's up, s0uljah, is what's been up the last ten times you've asked:
1. The character is drawn several different ways. In the one that appears to be the most-canonical, the character is drawn very differently. In particular, the thing in the upper-right-hand corner is drawn three different ways; one an unambiguous ji, one an unambiguous ba, and one a weird hybrid.
2. My *main* point is that it is not reasonable to derive the meaning "8" as a component of the meaning for the word "boat". The fact that the disputed bit of writing is, in fact, part of a *phonetic* part of the word means that I win this point no matter how we draw it.
3. As has also been pointed out, the word in question can thus be shown to go back far enough that it would have meant "divide", and been part of another character, rather than being an 8 selected to be part of this character.
So... the point I lose is "this character is never drawn in a way such that this component looks like an 8".
The points I still have are:
1. The meaning of a character often depends on knowing which parts of it are phonetic. (Supported by everyone who has expressed an opinion.)
2. The character for boat is often written with something in the upper-right which is clearly *NOT* the same character as an 8.
3. A correct understanding of the etymology of that word will not use the number 8.
So, if you want me to admit that, in some of the three different ways the word 'boat' is drawn, that component looks like an 8, sure, I admit that.
If this is supposed to then lead to the assertion that the etymology of 'boat' in Chinese really means '8 people vessel', you're going to have to do something about the fact that it's not drawn the same way other times, and that it's part of a phonetic component, so neither '8' nor 'people' is present in the etymology.
My concern here is that, out of five or six reasons given not to accept the original claims by the guy who wrote that book in 1979, you'll notice that only *ONE* has been discussed, at all. Why's that, I wonder? Maybe it's because there's room for legitimate debate about how that component of the character should be drawn, so there's a way to argue that maybe that *is* an 8. There isn't, apparently, any way for people to debate that it's part of a phonetic, and thus contributes no *meaning* to the word. Because, if there were, they'd have made that argument by now.
So, in the end, the claim that "this etymology is totally wrong" is still well-supported, even though I've granted that some people draw that character with a 'ba' in the upper right.
__________________ Save me / And when you see me strut / Remind me of what left this outlaw torn I follow Christ; therefore I am To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. . I affirm the Nicene Creed.
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. -- Romans 8:38-39
I claim nothing about the etymology, as I don't know anything about it. I do claim, that that character, the only one I have looked into, is in no doubt, and eight.
The "eight" character was your main objection and the one, I believe, caused you to laugh at AiG on that Yahoo Groups post.
If you're talking about the character that looks sort of like a / \, only with a bit of a line back from the top of the right-hand \, then yeah, that looks a fair bit like an eight. It has other meanings as well.
The character I was referring to is the one I've found in a number of dictionaries, when looking up chuan, which looks more like a 'ji'.
I'm willing to grant that the word 'chuan' is sometimes drawn such that, if we ignore etymology and just look at the shapes, it has something in it that looks a lot like an eight. It is not always drawn that way, and it is not clear to me that the character in question is intended to be an eight.
The reason I laugh at AiG is not *just* the 8. It's the ongoing sequence of incredibly stretched etymologies, such as interpreting a kou as (breath from God's) mouth, rather than just "probably mouth, maybe person, depending on context".
To summarize, in the dictionaries I normally use, chuan does not contain anything that anyone would call an eight. The font used by AiG and a few other sites is *different*.
__________________ Save me / And when you see me strut / Remind me of what left this outlaw torn I follow Christ; therefore I am To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. . I affirm the Nicene Creed.
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. -- Romans 8:38-39
Originally posted by seebs 2. My *main* point is that it is not reasonable to derive the meaning "8" as a component of the meaning for the word "boat". The fact that the disputed bit of writing is, in fact, part of a *phonetic* part of the word means that I win this point no matter how we draw it.
And the fact that the phonetic is derived from eight+mouth means you lose this point no matter what you claim. This was shown clearly by my post above, and that is from a source that has no stake in establishing its roots in Genesis.
The points I still have are:
1. The meaning of a character often depends on knowing which parts of it are phonetic. (Supported by everyone who has expressed an opinion.)
Bzzzt. The phonetic itself is subject to etymology, and that leads you to the eight+mouth. So you simply refuse to acknowledge that you can look any farther back than your phonetic, which is blatantly refusing to acknowledge the obvious truth.
2. The character for boat is often written with something in the upper-right which is clearly *NOT* the same character as an 8.
That's only partially true (the character IS an eight, depending on style), and it is irrelevant, anyway. The issue isn't how "boat" is drawn NOW, but how it originated. And it obviously originated as eight+mouth.
3. A correct understanding of the etymology of that word will not use the number 8.
Bzzt again. A correct understanding of the etymology shows that it has no other interpretation BUT to be 8.
You really should reconsider how you're handling this, seebs. It is rather perilous to refuse to love the truth, and that is far more important than the issue of boats and eights.
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