4 ms·
玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade". [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89 https://zh.m.wiktionary.o
by bgee 6y ago
玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade".
[0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89 https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89
- microcolonel 6y agoThen why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王. Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.
- bgee 6y ago>Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? I think we have done exactly that[0], it's just not part of the 1986 proposal in PRC. [0]: https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9B%AF https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9B%AF
- dheera 6y agoUnfortunately, vocabulary in languages are defined, not derived. Why isn't "business" a measure of how busy you are? Why isn't "waterboarding" analogous to "snowboarding" and "sandboarding"? (As an engineer I hate these peculiarities and I'm all for fixing them but the majority of the world tends to want to stick to the not-necessarily-logical definitions.)
- microcolonel 6y agoSure, I'm not saying everything has to make sense, but buddy here was claiming that 国 had cleaner etymology than 國, and to me it seems like one of these is indirect, and the other is very direct.