3 ms·

Trying to understand the nature of understanding: the etymologies

14 points by archibaldJ 11y ago

contingencies 11y ago
These thoughts were all the more interesting when I realised they were coming from a 19 year old (in case anyone missed the 'about' page). If I'm not mistaken this basically boils down to an honest historical inquiry in to an area that could be taken to be the intersection of philosophy, semantics and epistemology. It was nice to see the classical Chinese here. I have some knowledge of it (not an expert - currently translating https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu), though I'm not sure how closely the narrative follows. Personally I would suggest 理 should only be taken in the etymological context of 理解 to mean 'logic or reason', and 解 to 'explain'. The character evolution stuff is neither here nor there when taken in isolation (ie. outside the context of the compound double-glyph word), though the basic idea of 'explain' deriving from 'loosen' (in turn deriving from hacking the horns off oxen) is interesting as it seems the core explanatory notion of 'unfastening' or 'allowing access to something that was previously present, but opaque or impermeable' could be one major semantic etymology within the global history of the very human meme of 'understanding'. I suppose there would surely have been alternative ways to express understanding during the classical period of the Chinese language, which brings me to the main point: fundamentally one should first consider that classical Chinese was grammatically a completely different language to either Indo-European or modern Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese, in ways which explicitly affect both the frequency and specificity of verb use (if indeed they can be accurately defined in the context of classical Chinese, or are used at all), thus in fact the author is comparing apples to oranges on multiple levels. As a couple of missed potential tangents for the author, over a decade ago I happened to win a scholarship in ancient Chinese study through a cursory retelling of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_ho... as the story of the Logicians or School of Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Names - a 5th-3rd century BCE philosophical school that analyzed semantics, particularly around notions of what we would more casually call in English 'the verb to be'. Comprehension or understanding was thus under active research from a very early stage. For another example, take the following statements on Taoism: 道可道非常道 ("The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao") and 名可名非常名 ("The name that can be named is not the eternal name.") It would also have been nice to see an attempt at including Sanskrit, the other obvious alternative in Asia (its vast, heavily philosophical and analytical corpus of text is likely a fertile ground for research) - eg. see http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&q=understand&lang=en&action=Search http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&q=understand&l... or http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+understand&trans=Translate&direction=ES http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0... for an indicator of the potential volume of etymologies within this space. Add more if you try relative synonyms such as comprehend. Tamil, reportedly considered equally ancient in some respects, may also have enough early differences from Sanskrit conceptions of understanding to merit a mention. Are there any books exploring these unified perceptions of historical linguistic/cultural/semantic etymologies within a global or pan-humanist epistemological context? If not, it sure would be fun to write one!
- archibaldJ 11y ago
  Great comment! OP here. Yeah, I agree with you that it is analogous to comparing oranges with apples. I'm quite a beginner in classical Chinese. It took me some time to go through various sources and learn about origins of the two characters. I was aware that classical Chinese works rather differently from the modern languages that "borrow" lexical items from it and it would be inadequate to give only a brief history on certain usages of the lexical items, but getting in-depth in the discussion is way beyond my current capabilities (and I would like to keep the post short - after all it is meant to be more of a “web log” type of thing that I take some time to do everyday). Some day I will definitely look into Sanskrit and other languages that I’m least familiar with and examine how the idea of understanding is expressed, in the endeavor to understand what is understanding. I’m been trying to look for books on such topic too. I don’t think one that really expatiates on that exists. If I have the time I’d love to do some extensive research and (after having gained arcane knowledge and great insight) write one!

14 points by archibaldJ 11y ago

These thoughts were all the more interesting when I realised they were coming from a 19 year old (in case anyone missed the 'about' page). If I'm not mistaken this basically boils down to an honest historical inquiry in to an area that could be taken to be the intersection of philosophy, semantics and epistemology. It was nice to see the classical Chinese here. I have some knowledge of it (not an expert - currently translating https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu), though I'm not sure how closely the narrative follows. Personally I would suggest 理 should only be taken in the etymological context of 理解 to mean 'logic or reason', and 解 to 'explain'. The character evolution stuff is neither here nor there when taken in isolation (ie. outside the context of the compound double-glyph word), though the basic idea of 'explain' deriving from 'loosen' (in turn deriving from hacking the horns off oxen) is interesting as it seems the core explanatory notion of 'unfastening' or 'allowing access to something that was previously present, but opaque or impermeable' could be one major semantic etymology within the global history of the very human meme of 'understanding'. I suppose there would surely have been alternative ways to express understanding during the classical period of the Chinese language, which brings me to the main point: fundamentally one should first consider that classical Chinese was grammatically a completely different language to either Indo-European or modern Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese, in ways which explicitly affect both the frequency and specificity of verb use (if indeed they can be accurately defined in the context of classical Chinese, or are used at all), thus in fact the author is comparing apples to oranges on multiple levels. As a couple of missed potential tangents for the author, over a decade ago I happened to win a scholarship in ancient Chinese study through a cursory retelling of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_ho... as the story of the Logicians or School of Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Names - a 5th-3rd century BCE philosophical school that analyzed semantics, particularly around notions of what we would more casually call in English 'the verb to be'. Comprehension or understanding was thus under active research from a very early stage. For another example, take the following statements on Taoism: 道可道非常道 ("The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao") and 名可名非常名 ("The name that can be named is not the eternal name.") It would also have been nice to see an attempt at including Sanskrit, the other obvious alternative in Asia (its vast, heavily philosophical and analytical corpus of text is likely a fertile ground for research) - eg. see http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&q=understand&lang=en&action=Search http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&q=understand&l... or http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+understand&trans=Translate&direction=ES http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0... for an indicator of the potential volume of etymologies within this space. Add more if you try relative synonyms such as comprehend. Tamil, reportedly considered equally ancient in some respects, may also have enough early differences from Sanskrit conceptions of understanding to merit a mention. Are there any books exploring these unified perceptions of historical linguistic/cultural/semantic etymologies within a global or pan-humanist epistemological context? If not, it sure would be fun to write one!

archibaldJ 11y ago
Great comment! OP here. Yeah, I agree with you that it is analogous to comparing oranges with apples. I'm quite a beginner in classical Chinese. It took me some time to go through various sources and learn about origins of the two characters. I was aware that classical Chinese works rather differently from the modern languages that "borrow" lexical items from it and it would be inadequate to give only a brief history on certain usages of the lexical items, but getting in-depth in the discussion is way beyond my current capabilities (and I would like to keep the post short - after all it is meant to be more of a “web log” type of thing that I take some time to do everyday). Some day I will definitely look into Sanskrit and other languages that I’m least familiar with and examine how the idea of understanding is expressed, in the endeavor to understand what is understanding. I’m been trying to look for books on such topic too. I don’t think one that really expatiates on that exists. If I have the time I’d love to do some extensive research and (after having gained arcane knowledge and great insight) write one!