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One of my political science professors in college claimed that they used to struggle to translate constitutional documents to Chinese, as they didn't even have
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
One of my political science professors in college claimed that they used to struggle to translate constitutional documents to Chinese, as they didn't even have an agreed upon word for "human rights" until the 1970s or so.
I think this is what the parent was trying to communicate. All humans may have certain inalienable rights, but not all humans fully understand the concept, let alone demand (or even desire) that their rights be respected.
It's kind of mindblowing to contemplate, but enlightenment thought has yet to deeply penetrate the mainland Chinese populace.
- emodendroket 5y ago> One of my political science professors in college claimed that they used to struggle to translate constitutional documents to Chinese, as they didn't even have an agreed upon word for "human rights" until the 1970s or so. Simplified Chinese: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E4%BA%BA%E6%9D%83&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=34&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%E4%BA%BA%E6%9D%83%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E4%BA%BA%E6%9... English: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=human+rights&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chuman%20rights%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=human+rights&y... That claim appears to not be true. And since many Western concepts (like all the specialist communist terminology) made their way to Chinese through Japanese words using Chinese characters, if it _were_ true it would seem like it'd imply something about Japan too. Japanese uses a word with the same characters but I couldn't run down a good citation of the first dates all of these appeared besides the ngrams.