AiG responds to Seebs

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by ashibaka


YES, it's an eight NOW, but not in the time frame we're TALKING ABOUT!

I just gave you selections from a book that uses ™{ for its modern 8. "8" and "many" were not combined until hundreds of years after the etymological thing we're talking about, as the excerpts prove. Unless if there is a vast, anti-eight conspiracy after all!

And Nick showed an unrelated site having this "modern" eight as the "old" form.  So, whats the point?

 

[ashibaka]

Originally posted by s0uljah
And Nick showed an unrelated site having this "modern" eight as the "old" form.  So, whats the point?

Uh, as I recall, it wasn't the "old" form, it was the "full" form.

 

[npetreley]

Perhaps this will refresh everyone's memory.

From a site totally unrelated to creation (traditional Chinese medicine):

http://www.giuliaboschi.com/inglese/chinese_char.html

Ba gang

the eight diagnostic principles

(only the eight is represented here - see page for all characters)

Full: (ba1.gif)

Simplified: (ba2.gif)

Old: (ba.gif)

Here's the oracle bone script for boat:

Here's a table of progressions in other Chinese characters. From left to right, it's "pictograph, ancient character, present character." The bottom row shows the progression of the symbol for "mouth."

Taken from:

http://www.yutopian.com/religion/words/

By the way, I apologize if it offended you, Susan, but if you can find me a moron who actually DOESN'T see the obvious, then I'll be glad to withdraw my statement that any moron can see it. (grin)

 

[npetreley]

The board complains about too many images for one post, so here's the way it is explained using modern characters, for your reference:

An alternative version to show variance in style:

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by s0uljah
This controversy about whether that character is an eight has been very enlightening. Something so simple is clouded by the atheists...very telling, thanks.

s0uljah, the "clouding" is not a result of some kind of atheist conspiracy. It's a result of gradual changes over time in Chinese, such that it's not always easy to say for sure whether or not a given character changed.

If you were to take the writing of "chuan" in my Chinese dictionary, and show it to a native speaker, and ask what the thing in the upper-right was, I suspect there'd be roughly no one who'd call it an 8.

Really, that was one of the more offensive and hateful things I've seen you do - you're assuming that the disagreement is *necessarily* a result of bad faith among "atheists". I'm not an atheist, and I don't think it's a simple or cut-and-dried case; I've long since retracted my original claim that the "eight" reading was obviously wrong - clearly, the word is drawn different ways in different fonts, suggesting that no one really cares what it is, because it's just a phonetic part anyway.

I think you owe the people on this board who are actually seeking the truth an apology here.

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by seebs
I think you owe the people on this board who are actually seeking the truth an apology here.

Either you haven't read the above posts, or I think this isn't a matter of apologies but that you are one who desperately needs glasses.

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by s0uljah


My sister-in-law is Chinese.  She said it is definitely an eight.  I believe her.

SHE SAID THAT A SYMBOL OTHER THAN THE ONE I AM TALKING ABOUT WAS AN EIGHT.

Imagine, if you will, that I ask a thousand Chinese people what the symbol I'm discussing is, and none of them says eight.

Does that mean your sister-in-law is wrong? Probably not - it means YOU WERE SHOWING HER A DIFFERENT SYMBOL.

How often do we need to point out that several different symbols are under discussion, and that we are primarily interested in what they would or would not have meant *FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO*...

And, finally, in all of this, I haven't seen you address the observation that the correct etymology of the word doesn't assign separate meanings to the two halves of the phonetic component.

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by seebs
And, finally, in all of this, I haven't seen you address the observation that the correct etymology of the word doesn't assign separate meanings to the two halves of the phonetic component.

But I've addressed it.

And I haven't seen YOU address the obvious: That your etymology does not preclude further etymology. In other words, even if you can establish that at some point in time, "boat" consists of two component parts (the right and left halves), it says absolutely nothing about whether the right half can itself be broken down into two components (or even the possibility that you can dissect "vessel" further). It also does not disprove the possibility that the phonetic RESULTED from the combination.

I have shown that when you analyze the ancestral development of the language (another standard aspect of etymology, by the way), you can plainly see that the top and bottom halves of your "phonetic" progressed independently in the same way your combined phonetic did. If they didn't, then you might have a case that the two parts originated as a whole and never had any separate eight+mouth origins. But they DID progress in parallel. So while it is impossible to prove they are eight+mouth without going back in time, you haven't come within light years of falsifying the face-value conclusion that they DID originate as eight+mouth.

 

[ashibaka]

[post deleted] Yoohoo... post #136? X_x

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by ashibaka
[post deleted] Yoohoo... post #136? X_x

What about it? You successfully proved that ascii slashes and parens don't look anything like Chinese characters. So what do you want us to do, call the papers with this breakthrough?

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by seebs


s0uljah, the "clouding" is not a result of some kind of atheist conspiracy. It's a result of gradual changes over time in Chinese, such that it's not always easy to say for sure whether or not a given character changed.

If you were to take the writing of "chuan" in my Chinese dictionary, and show it to a native speaker, and ask what the thing in the upper-right was, I suspect there'd be roughly no one who'd call it an 8.

Really, that was one of the more offensive and hateful things I've seen you do - you're assuming that the disagreement is *necessarily* a result of bad faith among "atheists". I'm not an atheist, and I don't think it's a simple or cut-and-dried case; I've long since retracted my original claim that the "eight" reading was obviously wrong - clearly, the word is drawn different ways in different fonts, suggesting that no one really cares what it is, because it's just a phonetic part anyway.

I think you owe the people on this board who are actually seeking the truth an apology here.

So I am not honestly seeking the truth? 

I am not being hateful, at least not intentionally.  I apologize if I seem that way to you on this matter.  I respect your views, as I have said many times, but you seem totally off base here and seem to refuse responsibility for that.

 

[seebs]

s0uljah: My point is that other people here are also earnestly seeking truth, and you owe them an apology for implying that this is being clouded by some atheist conspiracy. I admit that my phrasing implies that you aren't also seeking truth; this was not intentional, and I apologize for it.

I guess, the problem here is that you seem to have come through a long and detailed discussion showing that the way a component of a character is drawn is inconsistent in different sources, and come to the conclusion that one of them is "right", and since it disagrees with one of my claims, that my claim is therefore *totally* wrong. However, since the character is also drawn *other* ways, I think it's fairly clear that the contrary claim ("that is unequivocally an 8") is *ALSO* wrong. So, both sides are partially right. That character might be an 8, or might not, depending on how the word was drawn. To find out, we turn not to how it's drawn today, but how it used to be drawn, and what the symbols meant at the time.

When we do that, we find out that the right-hand-side of the original character is a single phonetic, which goes back far enough that the symbol had different meanings anyway, so that even if it looks like an 8 *now*, it wasn't an 8 when it became part of the word.

 

[ashibaka]

Originally posted by npetreley
What about it? You successfully proved that ascii slashes and parens don't look anything like Chinese characters. So what do you want us to do, call the papers with this breakthrough?

Holy Toledo, Batman! Does this or does this not look like post #136? Are we quite finished with the eight thing now?

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by seebs
s0uljah: My point is that other people here are also earnestly seeking truth, and you owe them an apology for implying that this is being clouded by some atheist conspiracy. I admit that my phrasing implies that you aren't also seeking truth; this was not intentional, and I apologize for it.

I guess, the problem here is that you seem to have come through a long and detailed discussion showing that the way a component of a character is drawn is inconsistent in different sources, and come to the conclusion that one of them is "right", and since it disagrees with one of my claims, that my claim is therefore *totally* wrong. However, since the character is also drawn *other* ways, I think it's fairly clear that the contrary claim ("that is unequivocally an 8") is *ALSO* wrong. So, both sides are partially right. That character might be an 8, or might not, depending on how the word was drawn. To find out, we turn not to how it's drawn today, but how it used to be drawn, and what the symbols meant at the time.

When we do that, we find out that the right-hand-side of the original character is a single phonetic, which goes back far enough that the symbol had different meanings anyway, so that even if it looks like an 8 *now*, it wasn't an 8 when it became part of the word.

Seebs-

Are you going to respond to AiG about these issues?

 

[seebs]

S0uljah: I did send them a note.

The problem here is, if they *really* cared, they would have, for instance, presented me with their counterarguments, and discussed them. They don't want to do that. They want to post their "rebuttal" and sell copies of the original 1979 book that started it all.

You will notice, for instance, that they responded only to *ONE* of about ten distinct factual claims about Chinese characters.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that we get the Thought Police to destroy every Chinese dictionary or font that draws "chuan" with the symbol that looks like ji, rather than ba.

The fact is, even then, we *STILL* find huge problems with the alleged etymology... problems which were *NOT* addressed at all in their "rebuttal", and which I am distressingly confident they will never choose to refer to or discuss in any way.

I confronted them with many concerns; you will notice that their response does not address the question of why we should associate meaning with the phonetic components of characters.

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by seebs
S0uljah: I did send them a note.

The problem here is, if they *really* cared, they would have, for instance, presented me with their counterarguments, and discussed them. They don't want to do that. They want to post their "rebuttal" and sell copies of the original 1979 book that started it all.

You will notice, for instance, that they responded only to *ONE* of about ten distinct factual claims about Chinese characters.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that we get the Thought Police to destroy every Chinese dictionary or font that draws "chuan" with the symbol that looks like ji, rather than ba.

The fact is, even then, we *STILL* find huge problems with the alleged etymology... problems which were *NOT* addressed at all in their "rebuttal", and which I am distressingly confident they will never choose to refer to or discuss in any way.

I confronted them with many concerns; you will notice that their response does not address the question of why we should associate meaning with the phonetic components of characters.

Did they respond to your second note?

 

[seebs]

No, they didn't. On the other hand, it took them over a month to decide to edit my first note, and print part of it with a "rebuttal" ignoring key points, and to make no effort to verify that this rebuttal was persuasive.

 

[AV1611VET]

AiG misrepresents ancient Chinese language?

404

 

[essentialsaltes]

404

Sometime in the past 20 years, the monks at AIG scraped all the bits off the webpage to reuse it.

 

[AV1611VET]

Sometime in the past 20 years, the monks at AIG scraped all the bits off the webpage to reuse it.

Touché!