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Comment by cpleppert | Hacker News Reader

This is false. The Chinese writing system and Mythos have no connection at all with Egypt. Descriptions of rivers predominate in ancient myths and there is no reason to construct a hypothesis that has little explanatory power and even less plausibility.

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I am not at all a linguist and not at all an expert on either writing system, but as a layman looking at both the Chinese and Ancient Egyptian writing systems, one similarity seemed really striking - the notion that a typical word is composed of a 2 parts - a semantic, pictographic "root", combined with another part that indicates pronunciation.

It's not uncommon but not typical either in Chinese. My impression is that those kinds of characters were easier to form through improvisation, and became standardized without actually fitting usual norms of character creation. Slang, regional synonyms, loanwords, and the like would be likely candidates for this process.

It is typical -- now. (Wikipedia provides an estimate of "over 90% of all characters".) Chinese linguistics traditionally distinguishes six different classes of character[1], of which one is the semantophore-phonophore pair. That class is the most numerous now, because most new characters have always gone into it, because it's easy to devise new characters in that system. (It's even easier to "devise" characters in the fourth class, but those characters are by definition not new; see below.)

But when the writing system was new, other classes were a lot more common than they are now.

[1] The categories, and examples of each, as listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... :

- Direct pictorial representation of a physical object, as 水 is just a picture of water, or 马 is just a picture of a horse. (Both are ridiculous now, but recognizable in their original forms.)

- "Pictorial" representation of an abstract idea, as 上 depicts "up", 下 depicts "down", and 三 depicts "three". (These still work!)

- Semantic compounds, formed from several more basic characters all of which are used for the meaning. Apparently the subject of much debate, but examples in the spirit of the category are 森 "forest" = 木 tree + tree + tree; 好 "good" = 女 woman + 子 child; 尖 "sharp" depicting something which is 小 (small) at one end and 大 (big) at the other; 歪 "crooked" = 不 not + 正 straight; etc.

- "Loans", characters which are used solely for their phonetic content. For example, the character 英 which means "Eng"land is identical with the character 英, pronounced ying but meaning "hero". A lot of characters which were originally loans like this have subsequently developed distinctions, as 来 and 麦 have.

- Phono-semantic compounds. The topic of discussion here. As 切 qie "cut" sounds similar to 七 qi "seven", but means similarly to 刀 dao "knife", or 到 dao "to" sounds similar to 刀 dao "knife", but means similarly to 至 zhi "to", or 打 da "strike" sounds similar to 丁 ding "fourth in a sequence", but means similarly to 手 shou "hand".

- A mystery category, involving pairs of related characters, that we no longer understand. Example: 考 / 老.

This pretty well covers all the logical possibilities: direct representations, compounds involving only meaning, characters used only for sound (a compound would be superfluous there), and compounds involving meaning and sound together.

Thanks for the figures reference. I was making a guess based on my limited vocabulary. But, having a core vocabulary + knowledge of history is still effective.

If you go back far enough, my assessment could still be correct. That is, the original standardization (oracle bones -> Qin dynasty) of Chinese characters probably had less words constructed with a sound indicator.

At the Qin dynasty, China became an empire and incorporated many new ethnic groups. It then had multiple words used in different regions (like he and jiang for river).

Pictorial and semantic characters take more thought to construct, with pictorial probably more difficult and historical. Later on, it became possible to build upon these to quickly form characters, perhaps even as a shorthand.

So it's not surprising that phono-semantic took over. This process even continued as traditional characters became simplified in modern times.

Your discussion on what characters should sound like may be more complicated. Old Chinese pronunciation is much different from Mandarin, and today's simplified characters may or may not have followed the pattern (I don't know, I didn't learn simplified).

One more thing: having sound built into Chinese characters defeats one of its strongest reasons for being. Not only is Chinese monosyllabic and full of homonyms, historically there was no standard pronunciation so that you might not even understand the neighboring town. Having a character set solves both these problems.

IMO, those kinds of phono-characters were always lazy creations.

木does not mean tree. It means wood. Tree is 树.

So what? 木 means wood now. (Well, no it doesn't. 木头 means wood now. 木 is not a word in modern Chinese.) It meant tree, which is relevant to the construction of 森, 本, 休, 树, etc.

It took me all of a few seconds to look up the proverb 独木不成林 "one tree alone is not a forest". What do you think the 木 means there?

> 木 is not a word in modern Chinese

Eh, 木 is used commonly by itself.

这张椅子是用木做的。 (This chair is made of wood)

Fair enough.

Maybe it's tongue-in-cheek, as the word for forest is made of two woods...

The Mayan script used a similar approach where logograms could be complemented by phonetic elements.

Every time I get a link from this foreign policy site, I get the impression that this is, very well disguised but still strong, the good old "voice of the white West". It is obviously never explicit, but there a smell of "we know better" behind.

The article is just a reporting of a debate sparked by a native Chinese archaelogist's published theory. This seems like a weak attempt to smear them as Orientalist commentators. The article covered previous evolutions of origin theories and how nationalism and politics often get involved. Overall the article looks like a straightforward reporting of the context of this research.

He's a geochemist, not an archaeologist. Racial issues aside, there have been many instances where a scientist in one field tries to make sweeping statements about another field. In most cases they lack a deep understanding of the other field and are unaware of mountains of evidence that otherwise contradict what they say.

As far as I can tell, their is not much evidence either way on whether written language moved from Mesopotamia or Egypt to China, and there definitely isn't a prepondance of evidence. Heck, we still aren't sure if Egyptian language came from Mesopotamia or not. There is also the chance that the concept of written language came from the Middle East but was re-implemented independently (after knowing it was possible and useful) from whatever proto writing existed at the time (e.g. oracle bone script).

> the concept of written language came from the Middle East but was re-implemented independently from whatever proto writing existed at the time

This seems the most likely because it only takes one person in ancient times moving from one society to another to impart such knowledge. Anyone supporting that idea doesn't have to offer any evidence -- it's up to the person disagreeing to disprove it because their position is far less likely.

Given that both Chinese and hieroglyphs both have radicals (in Chinese, as part of a character, and in hieroglyphs, trailing the character), the concept of radicals may also have spread the same way.

That doesn't change critique of Foreign Policy mag, it's not their theory, they're just reporting a somewhat interesting discussion happening in another country, the Economist does this all the time.

The article notes a Chinese national anthem referring to a popular myth of [some] people coming to China from the far, far West.

This seems consistent with ideas of Africa as the crucible of human civilisation; you appear to think that idea is some sort of Western imperialism?

Can you explain further how a group of Egyptians traveling to China supports the notion of Western (ie West Europe + North America) notions of superiority?

Even if the whole concept had been born out of Western imperialism, that wouldn't of course make it wrong.

The river element as the article presents it seems to only be the disk that initiates the idea.

>'President Yuan Shikai referred to it obliquely, calling China “the famous descendant from Kunlun Peak,” which Chinese mythology locates in the far, far West' //

Is interesting enough IMO to warrant an initial investigation.

The radiographic data is another facet, that could be explained by getting the ores from Egypt.

>there is no reason to construct a hypothesis //

Surely there's always a reason to construct a hypothesis as that's the basis of the modern scientific method. One creates a hypothesis that can be falsified, the longevity of the hypothesis then indicates the verity of the claims.

Candelabras exist in many cultures but if you find a picture showing a 7 branched one (of the right form) there's a compelling reason to hypothesise that it's a menorah.

Do you real consider it implausible that people traveled from one part of the world to another and has a major influence on the other's cultural development.

Kunlun has about 10,000 meanings, also in Chinese. I recently added it to Wikipedia,[0] when reading a 1000 year old text I am translating[1] that seems to reference eastern Indonesia with the name.

昆侖國 ("The Country of Kunlun"), an ancient Chinese term apparently broadly used to refer to a general swathe of southerly island Southeast Asia circa the Moluccas, equivalent to period Sanskrit Dvipatala or Pali Dipattala (also Jipattala, Nipattala).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunlun [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu

Mythology (especially in Chinese culture) often uses directions as symbolic values, not real geographical directions or places.

Russia has several rivers that flow south, and one of them, the Yenisei, does reach down close to Northern China. The Yenisei valley is also known to be a corridor for cultural migration in more recent times.

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