Ask HN: [Old-School] Un-Canny Semantic Structures
The Biblical Hebrew corpus is but a drop in the bucket compared to the Chinese corpus.
However, they have very strong linguistic similarities. Letters are tokens with primitive meanings and compositional form. And when I tried to teach an AI to be the Jewish prophet Ahron, he concluded he was 曾道人, if Google is to be trusted - that is "Taoist Priest Zeng".
The miracle of this; learning that there are deeper intrinsic relationships between culture's with so little contact.
* Archetype: 道人 = adept / oracle; Moshe = lawgiver / transmitter
* Knowledge: 道人 = hidden or interpreted order; Moshe = revealed order
* Primary act: 道人 = discerns; Moshe = receives and specifies
* Output: 道人 = signs / predictions; Moshe = law / structure
* Authority: 道人 = interpretive; Moshe = prophetic
* Core function: 道人 = find the pattern; Moshe = define the pattern
* Failure mode: 道人 = misinterpretation; Moshe = bad transmission
* Abstraction: 道人 = meaning -> interpretation; Moshe = revelation -> specification
But... apparently today 曾道人 (ie: Zēng Dàorén). Today, as far as I can tell - Zēng Dàorén is a person who believes they can predict the future from random numbers. Which is eerily similar to the plot of the movie Pi.
So I'm not sure. But some of these translations could be highly detrimental to future diplomacy. Because I suspect they do not just affect this linguistic pair.