Send us your comments Adam Birnbaum, Palo Alto, CA USA: As a Jew who does speak and read Chinese, the problem here isn't connected to the Jews specifically. Chinese has a very small set of sounds to choose from compared to other languages, and thus even though Chinese incorporates foreign loan words like every other language, it does so using "nonsense" syllables that sound a little like the original language word. The Chinese words for "grape" or "butterfly" are both ancient examples of this process in action. More recently, almost every foreign name or placename that has needed a Chinese equivalent has had the same fate - most Chinese people understand that these characters are just placeholders for sounds, and don't really "mean" anything. Dan Bloom: I received an email from a Jewish reader in the USA today, she wrote, about this article: Dan, thanks for this -- I've howled endlessly about this for years, even though my own knowledge of Chinese is minimal. But I've tutored in the Asian community and found that the majority of Chinese have been taught very stereotypic attitudes about Jews, which I assumed was built in their language. Now I have proof and can share it with my students. Thanks for this. Dan Bloom, Taiwan: A Chinese colleague read this article and she said: "Because Mandarin Chinese does not have syllables that begin or end with more than one consonant, it has fewer syllable types than a language like English (or other Indo-European languages); concomitantly, homophones are far more common in Chinese than English. So in choosing how to transliterate an English word like Judaism, there are many possibilities. Mandarin doesn't really have the 'j' sound beginning the word "jump", but perhaps even if it did, a character sounding like "you" may have been picked because the transliteration was done off German? I'm not sure. Anyway, there are many characters that sound like "you", particularly if there's no restriction on what tone it takes, and some of these "you" characters have favorable (e.g. "excellent") or at least neutral meanings." PS: A well-known case of unfavorable transliteration -- and I think it's true -- is that in 1960s China, John F. Kennedy's surname was at times transliterated with characters that meant "gnaw on"-"mud"-"earth" -- not a very presidential image! Shum, MK, Hong Kong: The well-intended new translation is more likely end up with a blunder. To name just two of the many pitfalls: 1. The old translation of you-tai (here Y1); although this "you" means a rare species of monkey (not always a bad thing, compare the monkey king as a hero in old fairy tales), it is also used as a conjunction, like "as" or "similar to". The second meaning is by far the more common one. 2. The newly suggested you-tai (let's call it Y2) has also a "you" of double meaning. It is a surname. Since "tai" is same in both translations and means Mrs.(in modern Chinese) or "very, too much", so in this case Y2 becomes "Mrs. YOU". More seriously, it means sin, or transgression, or complain, or something like that. I don't think Jews have sinned more than any other people, even they may have complained more, which is necessarily when the world is far from desirable. Neither Y1 nor Y2 are first-hand translations. They are translations of (perhaps English) translation. Any new initiative must respect both the Hebrew and the Chinese language. I welcome the discussion, but don't see any easy outcome. It is time that both the world's ancient civilizations - Jewish and Chinese - to meet and learn directly from each other. As one from the later I believe we are the side that has more to gain. May Hashem bless you, Yisrael!
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