Human ethnic groups...

[Josephus]

"At this point, you run into Chinese written history; they were there before the time at which Babel should have fallen."

Seebs! I'm so glad you wrote this!

check this article out:
http://www.searchforthetruth.org/v_12.htm

 

[seebs]

Ow, that page just hurts. I read Chinese (not well, I'm out of practice), and... uhm... Their interpretation is painfully stretched. They don't know how Chinese characters are formed, or how to distinguish between radicals used for meaning, and radicals used for sound.

As commented; the Chinese have history that goes back *way* too far.

 

[seebs]

HEY!

They're just flat-out lying. There's a symbol that they describe as meaning "8". It doesn't; depending on which tone it was pronounced with, it would be either "table" or "many". Sort of.

Also, the square symbol that they say means "people" in their description of boat doesn't mean any such thing. It means "mouth". If they used the standard dictionary example of the use of kou as a measure word, there's an example ending in 'wu kou ren' which is translated as 'five people' - but it's 'five mouths of people', like 'five head of cattle'. The square symbol doesn't mean "people".

So... The one for boat is *totally* wrong. The attempted etymology for the verb "create" is so far-fetched that I can't even describe how it's wrong, except to say that "this is not how characters are formed". They put a thing that looks like an apostrophe on a thing that looks like a plus sign with a line under it, and claimed that it combines their meanings... but it doesn't! The resulting symbol has different and unrelated meanings.

These people don't understand Chinese, at all.

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by seebs

These people don't understand Chinese, at all.

I did some more research on this. There are a large number of problems with the explanation, and so far as I can tell, it's survived so long only because so few people read Chinese.