DICTIONARY MYTHS: PEDANTIC SCHOLARSHIP AND MYTH MAKING

MISSING THE BIG PICTURE
WHO IS TELLING THE STORY?

An Australian physicist has uncovered an error in dictionary definitions that has likely stood uncorrected for a century.Oxford English Dictionary said he was the first person to question the definition of siphon, which dated from 1911 and had been written by editors who were not scientists. Oxford Dictionary won't admit their 100 year mistake, but only that his views would be taken into account as they updated the entire reference book which may take another 100 years - who knows? Use the Internet to find the correct answers it is more reliable. An extensive check of online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force in a siphon. [source]

Thought Police: You can't think all that wonderfully well without words and whoever controls the language controls the conversatoins and perhaps what you are allowed to thing and know. THIS IS CENSORSHIP.
An entire country of Irish people / journalists / musicians, and athletes speaking Irish to each other have no problem with the etymology of jazz being Irish. Irish Language Speakers know how TEAS is pronounced and what it means. We will not tolerate word robbery that fosters obscurity and oblivion of the very words that keep the threads "knowing", a people's identity, and culture intact. The very words that cut back through the fog of time and our the culture's memory.
A people's language being relegated to the UNKOWN as if it doesn't exist. As if a people's identity which is entirely known by their language do not exist. As if what their culture, and cultural memory knows doesn't exist. No theft of memory allowed here, words trace our memories, and our identities.


From Threatened Languages to Threatened Lives Daniel L. Everett.

Etymology of Sneak -sneaky gossip serves a purpose If you do not get to - have - keep - and possess your own words, then in time you and your people won't remember and know what you know.

DICTIONARIES ARE TRUSTED SOURCES
INFORMATION OR PROPAGANDA?

Sneaky Dictionary Dicks, publisher$, editor$, online player$, and word a dayer$ are the thought police not Irish Subject Scholars, merely ordinary people; who happen to control what gets into a print and online dictionary. And just like any other ordinary person, can be arrogant, ignorant, sexist, classist, and very wrong. By refusing to acknowledge substantiated evidence and print the sanas of Jazz is Irish and by refusing to print that there is a possibility that sanas of Jazz MIGHT be Irish it confirms that when dictionary dics say "origins unknown" it really only means "THEY don't know". With reputations to establish or protect and because some are climbing the academic ladder it is easy for them to pollute the scholarly record.

Dictionary Racist Language thought police

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Factoids are stupid things H-Bot a history of a software agent.
Factoid: An invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print - Webster.

ANOTHER example is the word Vigorish all the online dictionary dicks say it's Yiddish.
WRONG it is NOT Yiddish but another excellent example of the "Racialization of Language".

Oral Tradition - Gossip Serves a Purpose
Lakoff writes that "Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears, and a trunk, are associated with circuses and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame...this gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame--and it won't be the frame you want."

"The East-West Dichotomy" What's wrong with Western 'China studies' By Thorsten Pattberg 2012

天人合一
Tian Ren He Yi
It literally means "harmony of men and nature." It's a traditional Chinese concept that men and nature are not above each other, but rather they are one.

大同
Datong
It literally means "great sameness." It's a traditional Confucian idea of "great harmony and common prosperity."

圣人
Shengren
It literally means a "saint" but it doesn't have a religious connotation. It refers to a noble person at one with nature and at ease with oneself.

君子
Junzi
It literally means a "man of noble character" or a "man of status" who is upright and benevolent.

MANY Western observers remain blissfully ignorant about the Chinese language and refuse to adopt Chinese terminologies into their China reports. They describe and interpret Chinese culture on the back of their own Western taxonomies and concepts. As if the West was the end of history.

You don't believe it? Read the recent New York Times article "A Confucian Constitution for China" by "Confucian philosopher" Daniel A Bell. It's about China but it doesn't include a single piece of Chinese terminology. As if The New York Times ordered Professor Bell to keep his China text clean of Chinese, so to speak. He is not alone.

You may not be aware of this, but powerhouses like Germany require all its "China experts" to be German, and all its books written about China to be written in clean German diction, as if the Chinese people, their lexicon and their socio-cultural originality, did not serve any purpose at all in the history of thought. The Germans call it Chinabild or China-image, but it really is this: "a China without Chinese".

The Germans wouldn't doubt for a moment the fact that the German language was essential to understanding their own culture. Yet, for foreign cultures it's exactly the opposite: as far as the German media and academia are concerned, foreign cultures precisely cannot be understood unless translated into familiar German.

Eastern originality

We know that the billions of East Asians in the world throughout history were thinking and giving names to their inventions all the time. Why is it that European countries, which barely hold 0.8-1.2 percent of the world's population, are blending out all of that Eastern originality?

What is wrong, for example, with Europe adapting Chinese concepts like wenming, shengren, or junzi; or Hindu concepts like dharma, karma, and prajna? Why do Europeans fearfully gatekeep their cultures from an inflow of Eastern originality?

Some commentators have argued with me, that the West is full. Full as in "no more capacity to learn." It is true that exotic Chinese concepts like kung fu, yin and yang, fengshui, and Tao have already made Western historians feel weary and insecure. How to "Westernize" so many Asians who have so many non-Western ideas in their heads?

Meanwhile, Hindi concepts like atman, avatar, yoga, nirvana and pundit make the United States look less Christian by the day. But wasn't Christianity supposed to be superior to all? There are tens of thousands of Eastern concepts that are censored out of the Western system just to keep the illusion of a universal Judeo-Christian manifest destiny alive.

Germany is a case in point, where the ruling class controls the general public to live in an artificial German world (except for English loan-words, which are forced upon the Germans for historical reasons), and demand all immigrants to express "knowledge" solely in the form of German language. Knowledge in Germany exists only if it's known in German.

As a result, German scholars, submerged in clean German culture, are destined to misappropriate China's history, etymologies, experiences, ideas and originality and, most importantly, they will intuitively omit the "correct Chinese names" of decisively non-German concepts and hide them from the German public. German China scholarship behaves like an organized syndicate - dealing with ideas and protecting their language turf.

Lecturing China

Not a day passes in North American and European media in which politicians, feuilletonists, and journalists do not lecture China on "democracy" and "human rights", words that are, you may have considered this, Western vocabularies and therefore cannot exist in China. Imagine if China would return such a favor and demand from the West more datong or tian ren he yi.

Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home.

Most Western academics, existentially dependent on their nation states (they are state-employees), frequently replace Chinese originality with Western biblical or philosophical translations, or choose Western words and simply annotate them with "Chinese," and thus present exactly the image of China they want to see: a place of zero originality.

There are now "Chinese religions," "Chinese saints," "Chinese gods," "Chinese universities,"and so on. Yet, you will find that what these scholars "translated" from - presumably the words jiao, shengren, shen, and daxue - do not bear any historical or meaningful resemblances to those Western terminologies.

Confucius once said: If the names are not correct, speech is not in accordance with the truth of things. What we see in Western "China Studies" is a fraud. It's absurd to talk about "Chinese philosophers" when 95 percent of the Chinese population have never heard or read about such a word. They have shengren in China.

Intellectual property theft

We may call late 20th-21st Western "China Studies" the greatest intellectual property theft of all time. In world history, it should rank as another Western impostor besides the evils of 17th-19th centuries' Western missions to Christianize China.

We call our age the "Age of Knowledge"; but ask the average American or European to name a single Chinese concept: the answer will be "none". They will talk about Chinese religion, Chinese food, Chinese culture ... they don't know a single correct taxonomy.

Human nature is not like this; nature has made people curious and inquisitive. The Western public would love to know what a shengren is, if only the media would print this Chinese word, ever. I believe it is the nature of their nation states, their language policies and their propaganda education systems, that keep the Western public in the dark about foreign cultures.

Human knowledge is the combined originality and inventiveness of the human race expressed in all its traditions and languages. But the truth is some people would rather see your language die.

Thorsten Pattberg is a German linguist and cultural critic from Peking University. He is the author of "The East-West Dichotomy" (2009) and "Shengren" (2011), and he publishes widely on language imperialism. His e-mail: thorsten.pattberg@hotmail.com