Source:
Global Research
Dr. Thorsten Pattberg
If
you are an American or European citizen, chances are you've never heard
about shengren, minzhu and wenming. If one day you promote them, you
might even be accused of culture treason.
That's because these
are Chinese concepts. They are often conveniently translated as
"philosophers," "democracy" and "civilization." In fact, they are none
of those. They are something else. Something the West lacks in turn. But
that is irritating for most Westerners, so in the past, foreign
concepts were quickly removed from the books and records and, if
possible, from the history of the world, which is a world dominated by
the West. As the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once
remarked, the East plays no part in the formation of the history of
thought.
But let us step back a bit. Remember what school told us
about the humanities? They are not the sciences! If the humanities were
science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not
overlap. Does that surprise you?
I estimate that there are over
35,000 Chinese words or phrases that cannot properly be translated into
the English language. Words like yin and yang, kung fu and fengshui. Add
to this another 35,000 Sanskrit terminology, mainly from India and
Buddhism. Words like Buddha, bodhisattva and guru.
In a recent
lecture at Peking University, the renowned linguist Gu Zhengkun
explained that wenming describes a high level of ethics and gentleness
of a people, while the English word "civilization" derives from a city
people's mastery over materials and technology.
The correct
Chinese translation of civilization should be chengshijishu-zhuyi.
Wenming is better, but untranslatable. It has been around for some
thousand years, too, while Europe's notion of "civilization" is a late
18th-century "invention."
Tourists and imperialists do not come
to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. Then
they realize that the names are not correct.
