

Trying to understand the nature of understanding: the etymologies - archibaldJ
http://0a.io/still-trying-to-understand-the-true-nature-of-understanding-etymologies/

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contingencies
These thoughts were all the more interesting when I realised they were coming
from a 19 year old (in case anyone missed the 'about' page). If I'm not
mistaken this basically boils down to an honest historical inquiry in to an
area that could be taken to be the intersection of philosophy, semantics and
epistemology.

It was nice to see the classical Chinese here. I have some knowledge of it
(not an expert - currently translating
[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu)),
though I'm not sure how closely the narrative follows. Personally I would
suggest 理 should only be taken in the etymological context of 理解 to mean
'logic or reason', and 解 to 'explain'. The character evolution stuff is
neither here nor there when taken in isolation (ie. outside the context of the
compound double-glyph word), though the basic idea of 'explain' deriving from
'loosen' (in turn deriving from hacking the horns off oxen) is interesting as
it seems the core explanatory notion of 'unfastening' or 'allowing access to
something that was previously present, but opaque or impermeable' could be one
major semantic etymology within the global history of the very human meme of
'understanding'. I suppose there would surely have been alternative ways to
express understanding during the classical period of the Chinese language,
which brings me to the main point: fundamentally one should first consider
that classical Chinese was grammatically a completely different language to
either Indo-European or modern Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese, in ways
which explicitly affect both the frequency and specificity of verb use (if
indeed they can be accurately defined in the context of classical Chinese, or
are used at all), thus in fact the author is comparing apples to oranges on
multiple levels.

As a couple of missed potential tangents for the author, over a decade ago I
happened to win a scholarship in ancient Chinese study through a cursory
retelling of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_ho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse)
as the story of the Logicians or School of Names
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Names](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Names)
\- a 5th-3rd century BCE philosophical school that analyzed semantics,
particularly around notions of what we would more casually call in English
'the verb to be'. Comprehension or understanding was thus under active
research from a very early stage. For another example, take the following
statements on Taoism: 道可道非常道 ("The Tao that can be told is not the eternal
Tao") and 名可名非常名 ("The name that can be named is not the eternal name.")

It would also have been nice to see an attempt at including Sanskrit, the
other obvious alternative in Asia (its vast, heavily philosophical and
analytical corpus of text is likely a fertile ground for research) - eg. see
[http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&q=understand&l...](http://sanskritdictionary.com/?iencoding=iast&q=understand&lang=en&action=Search)
or
[http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0...](http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+understand&trans=Translate&direction=ES)
for an indicator of the potential volume of etymologies within this space. Add
more if you try relative synonyms such as comprehend. Tamil, reportedly
considered equally ancient in some respects, may also have enough early
differences from Sanskrit conceptions of understanding to merit a mention.

Are there any books exploring these unified perceptions of historical
linguistic/cultural/semantic etymologies within a global or pan-humanist
epistemological context? If not, it sure would be fun to write one!

~~~
archibaldJ
Great comment! OP here. Yeah, I agree with you that it is analogous to
comparing oranges with apples. I'm quite a beginner in classical Chinese. It
took me some time to go through various sources and learn about origins of the
two characters. I was aware that classical Chinese works rather differently
from the modern languages that "borrow" lexical items from it and it would be
inadequate to give only a brief history on certain usages of the lexical
items, but getting in-depth in the discussion is way beyond my current
capabilities (and I would like to keep the post short - after all it is meant
to be more of a “web log” type of thing that I take some time to do everyday).
Some day I will definitely look into Sanskrit and other languages that I’m
least familiar with and examine how the idea of understanding is expressed, in
the endeavor to understand what is _understanding_.

I’m been trying to look for books on such topic too. I don’t think one that
really expatiates on that exists. If I have the time I’d love to do some
extensive research and (after having gained arcane knowledge and great
insight) write one!

