SJ, I know you have an unfortunate habit of censoring comments that hurt your feelings or offend you in any way, which lends you a reputation for being "thin-shelled" but please recognize that I am not attacking you personally, just the idiot(s) who produced that slide show.
It is obvious that the creator(s) of the video you linked to know(s) jack shit about Chinese culture, history, and language. A few notable errors:
He identifies the ancient Chinese divinity Shang Di with the character of "God" in the Bible. This neglects to mention that there is no evidence that the pre-Buddhist Chinese religion centered on Shang Di worship was EVER strictly monotheistic, but rather henotheistic, recognizing one supreme higher power and various lesser deities, spirits, etc. Even if you interpret Shang Di in monotheistic terms, Shang Di is more of an impersonal or semi-personal celestial being, really more of a "world order" than an anthropomorphic deity, so the Shang Di cult is completely unrelated to Western monotheism.
Next he (she? they?) make(s) the ridiculous (and completely irrelevant) claim that the Chinese call the Bible a "Western" book though it is not. First he makes the incredibly idiotic argument that the Bible is not "Western" because it was written in Hebrew and Greek (he omits Aramaic!) not English, implying that "Western civilization" originated with the Anglo-Saxons and that the Greeks were non-Western. He/she/they also argues that the Biblical authors can be traced to Egypt and Babylon even though the precursors of so-called Western civilization are often traced back to the Egyptians (and to a lesser extent Mesopotamia). Of course, this is not directly relevant to what the Chinese call "Western" and further a distraction from his/her/their main argument (which is laughably retarded, btw).
The rest of the presentation shows how Chinese characters are often composites of smaller characters whose semantical meaning ALLEGEDLY correspond to words in passages of the King James Bible describing the words/concepts connoted by the composite character in question. Never mind that the connection is rather tenuous, easily coincidental, and the resemblance between the smaller characters in "composite characters" with their standalone counterparts is often superficial. The author(s) fallaciously believe that Chinese is a purely ideographic writing system when in fact it is a highly complex semanto-phonetic system with characters (logograms) standing for words and morphemes, not abstract disconnected ideas or concepts. Nor are they pictograms. Chinese logograms have both semantic and phonetic features. So are neither pure pictograms/ideograms nor purely syllabic characters, but a bit of both.
It is obvious that whoever made that joke of an animation knows precisely dick about the Chinese language!
3 comments:
WHAT THE FUCK?!?
SJ, I know you have an unfortunate habit of censoring comments that hurt your feelings or offend you in any way, which lends you a reputation for being "thin-shelled" but please recognize that I am not attacking you personally, just the idiot(s) who produced that slide show.
It is obvious that the creator(s) of the video you linked to know(s) jack shit about Chinese culture, history, and language. A few notable errors:
He identifies the ancient Chinese divinity Shang Di with the character of "God" in the Bible. This neglects to mention that there is no evidence that the pre-Buddhist Chinese religion centered on Shang Di worship was EVER strictly monotheistic, but rather henotheistic, recognizing one supreme higher power and various lesser deities, spirits, etc. Even if you interpret Shang Di in monotheistic terms, Shang Di is more of an impersonal or semi-personal celestial being, really more of a "world order" than an anthropomorphic deity, so the Shang Di cult is completely unrelated to Western monotheism.
Next he (she? they?) make(s) the ridiculous (and completely irrelevant) claim that the Chinese call the Bible a "Western" book though it is not. First he makes the incredibly idiotic argument that the Bible is not "Western" because it was written in Hebrew and Greek (he omits Aramaic!) not English, implying that "Western civilization" originated with the Anglo-Saxons and that the Greeks were non-Western. He/she/they also argues that the Biblical authors can be traced to Egypt and Babylon even though the precursors of so-called Western civilization are often traced back to the Egyptians (and to a lesser extent Mesopotamia). Of course, this is not directly relevant to what the Chinese call "Western" and further a distraction from his/her/their main argument (which is laughably retarded, btw).
The rest of the presentation shows how Chinese characters are often composites of smaller characters whose semantical meaning ALLEGEDLY correspond to words in passages of the King James Bible describing the words/concepts connoted by the composite character in question. Never mind that the connection is rather tenuous, easily coincidental, and the resemblance between the smaller characters in "composite characters" with their standalone counterparts is often superficial. The author(s) fallaciously believe that Chinese is a purely ideographic writing system when in fact it is a highly complex semanto-phonetic system with characters (logograms) standing for words and morphemes, not abstract disconnected ideas or concepts. Nor are they pictograms. Chinese logograms have both semantic and phonetic features. So are neither pure pictograms/ideograms nor purely syllabic characters, but a bit of both.
It is obvious that whoever made that joke of an animation knows precisely dick about the Chinese language!
Look dude, it's my blog I'm not interested in taking any b.s.
Anyways you're right, in that it is incorrect to say that the ancient Chinese were monotheistic. The video don't say that.
The translations of the chinese characters seem to be correct. You can disagree if there are correlations with the bible.
In the future, when you feel the need to flip out, please go to your therapist instead of me. Thanks.
Also Dave, you're a moron. Chinese does have pictograms at its core.
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