thanks for your patience, Klaus. you are, of course right. a fellow chinese
student has sent the followings in response to my post:
Re-search
in English may takes a different view than the Chinese "research". It is
unfair to translate English (phonetic) to Chinese (pictorial), as the
fundamental differences in valuing knowledge. Research is translated as ç ”ç©¶
in Chinese. The term is a combination of has two words:
ç ” takes the meaning of grinding stone, it is further built up by çŸ3 (stone)
and å*€ (open).
究 takes the meaning of investigation or study, it is further built up by 穴
(cave) and ä1* (prolong or many)
Lets be funny about this, research in China is "to stay in a cave for long
hours to grind stone into finest sand"? Doesn't it sounds quite pragmatic to
describe research? Only that the Chinese language is symbolic, so we may
have to fill in the gaps between concepts to paint the whole picture?
Besides "brain" in Chinese is not where the mind sits. The mind rest in the
heart instead of the brain. That is due to the fundamental people-oriented
philosophy that focuses on morality and relationship. If we want to go on
about this message.. we will hit the 1) differences in thinking between
Western aristotelian analytical and Chinese naive-dialecticm, and 2)
similarity between presocrates and postmodernist western thinking and
Chinese totality thinking.
rosan
Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
> it would indeed be
> interesting to know and analyze the component meanings that describe in
> chinese what people do when they carefully examine data, records, available
> things in order to better understand and speak of these and refer to these
> practices to claim that they have done a good job of it.
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