Saturday, March 11, 2006

Chinese: God's Language?

Tian reminded me that while the missionaries might say that Japanese was the work of the devil, they have no problem with Chinese--in its written form, at least. Check out his post on HanziSmatter about the World Bible School's crackpot theory that evidence of Christian theology is to be found in the composition of Chinese characters (which ignores the fact that characters contain semantically irrelevant phonetic elements and the existence of loan characters, etc.). Tian also writes that according to SmartFilter, the World Bible School (World BS for short?) site is classified as "phishing" "criminal skills." Too bad it's not classified as "Bad Sinology."

More on the World BS theory at Pinyin.info.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hiya Amida -

Not related to your post at all, there was an editorial by Taro Aso in the WSJ yesterday that I thought you might find interesting. I'd have emailed it (in case you don't have a subscription) but you don't have an address listed on your blog...?

(P.S. What student doesn't sometimes think Japanese really is the devil's language? Not that Chinese would be any more divine by that measure. :) )

amida said...

Hi Shae,
That editorial seems to be subscriber-only. Is it available anywhere else? I haven't been following the Aso stuff, but have seen posts about him on Mutant Frog. Take a look!