{"id":654,"date":"2007-03-02T09:11:54","date_gmt":"2007-03-02T01:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/orientalism-and-chinese-characters-the-case-of-busyness\/"},"modified":"2018-08-22T16:35:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T08:35:21","slug":"orientalism-and-chinese-characters-the-case-of-busyness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/orientalism-and-chinese-characters-the-case-of-busyness\/","title":{"rendered":"Orientalism and Chinese characters: the case of &#8216;busyness&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Victor H. Mair has sent me another piece along the lines of his popular essay <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/chinese\/crisis.html\">danger + opportunity &#8800; crisis<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>The new piece discusses a misinterpretation of the nature of the Chinese character for <em>m&#225;ng<\/em> (&#8221;busy&#8221;). <\/p>\n<p>Since the entire essay is just a few paragraphs long, I won&#8217;t excerpt from it here but simply encourage everyone to read the whole thing: <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/chinese\/busyness_heart_killing.html\">busyness &#8800; heart + killing<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>For related examples of this fanciful approach to etymology that Mair exposes, see <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/newinstall\/2006\/misunderstandings-of-biblical-proportions\/\">misunderstandings of biblical proportions<\/a>. And for a detailed explanation of how Chinese characters really do function, see <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/readings\/texts\/visible\/index.html\">Chinese<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 3em;\">&#24537;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Victor H. Mair has sent me another piece along the lines of his popular essay danger + opportunity &#8800; crisis. The new piece discusses a misinterpretation of the nature of the Chinese character for m&#225;ng (&#8221;busy&#8221;). Since the entire &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/orientalism-and-chinese-characters-the-case-of-busyness\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15,41,28,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-english","category-languages","category-victor-h-mair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7821,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654\/revisions\/7821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}