Lotti replied to my article, and added a message from Hilary as well. I’ll address both Lotti’s reply and Hilary’s message in this video. I choose to reply by video because that is currently easier for me, and I can tell and show more with a visual presentation.
Recommended reading: John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, especially chapter 6, ‘How do Chinese characters represent sounds’, and chapter 7, ‘How do Chinese characters convey meaning’.
Me and Lotti a few years ago. Don’t worry, we are still good friends.
In my The Mystery of the Text online course I talk about the etymology of Chinese characters, and how the majority of the Chinese characters are composed: there is a meaning component, that gives a hint for the meaning, and a sound component, that gives a hint for the pronunciation. This principle is explained in detail on Wikipedia. Several books and websites however see the sound component as a meaning component – they try to relate every part of the character to the meaning of the character as they perceive it. Alfred Huang (who btw died last year) does this in his Yijing translation The Complete I Ching, and another Yijing researcher who does this is Lotti Heyboer, aka LiSe, on her website www.yijing.nl.
One of my students mentioned to Lotti the video in which I discuss this take on Chinese characters, a take that in my opinion is wrong and hardly sustainable. This prompted Lotti to write a blog article in which she defends her position: ‘Etymology, fact, and fiction’. This article is my response to that blog post, although I would have preferred to add my comments to Lotti’s article, but there is no option to do that. Continue reading
In this video we are going to look at the phrase she da chuan 涉大川, ‘cross the great river’ and the early usage of the keywords from this phrase.
