I found the original site more than ten years ago in university. Was amazed by the rich content. Thought it was probably a big well-funded academic project. A few years ago I learned it was done by a single person living in China out of pure love of our language. And he had trouble renewing his visa and had health problems. I was even more impressed. Now he has a very rare Chinese permanent residency for foreigners and has been able to monetize some of his work. I feel so happy for him. Thank you sir for all the great work.
This website isn't really about etymology as traditionally understood, but only about the evolution of characters. Etymology would be connecting modern Chinese forms to the reconstructed Middle Chinese and Old Chinese pronunciations, and linking them to their cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages. (This field, incidentally, has made huge strides in the last two decades, but even for linguists it is hard to keep up with the flood of scholarship, and you should take anything on an amateur enthusiast-run website with a grain of salt.)
You probably know more about linguistics than I do (disclaimer: very little), but I suspect you might not fully appreciate that "etymology" here is probably just a mere translation of the very well established discipline of studying the history of Han characters in East Asia...
Alternatively, would you have a better suggestion on what to name this in English, if it shouldn't be called "etymology"?
Also, what specifically would you recommend taking with a grain of salt from the website -- that the data might be wrong? Or are you implying that, notwithstanding a possible name confusion, that the study of evolution of characters is somehow not a worthy exercise for "serious" scholars?
(Disclaimer: I'm an amateur Chinese fan for one year.)
I understand and respect the difference between the two definitions of etymology given. I also agree that tracking the actual changes in character composition and contemporary usage, as etymology, is the better definition. But having no academic experience with Chinese yet, and relying only on the Internet and natives to explain "the meaning behind the symbols", I find that this looser definition, which could perhaps also be called pictographic decomposition, is an adventure into the web of meaning. This is perhaps not the exact history of a word or a character, but perhaps like the 90s JPEGs, you get a certain resolution by knowing the literal meaning of a single character or word's components, and then later on, track the full extent of Chinese etymology.
I would refer to the subject of this website as the history of writing systems, which is an established field of linguistics alongside etymology.
Yes, there is a risk that data here might be wrong, though maybe not so much from this website because of the author’s limited concerns. (The author himself has always been upfront about being an amateur enthusiast in this domain.) But my comments were meant very generally: wherever one reads about Chinese etymology, be aware that the claims may be out of date and superseded by new research, because the field has been so productive since the 1990s.
There's a material difference between Han character writing systems and pronunciation based writing systems -- a Han character carries roughly the same amount of "meaning" as a "word" in European languages, and the written form is standardized and persistent, so it doesn't evolve the same way as European/pronunciation-based languages do (in which spelling evolves over time).
The relatively unique way Han characters work may explain the difference in the focus between traditional etymology that you refer to, and the etymology in the website. I'm not sure "history of writing systems" is a good way to capture what the site is doing... Anyway it's more of a issue of translation (of a traditional area of study in East Asia that might not quite exactly exist in the West)
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I suppose one thing about "Chinese etymology" is that every native speaker of Chinese seems to feel entitled to dabble in it every once a while. In recent years Hong Kong has seen a resurgence of interest in written Cantonese, and there has been no shortage of self-proclaimed amateur etymologists who put forward the most ridiculous claims that even a high school student could debunk... I contribute to a cantonese dictionary and we have a general policy of disregarding and excluding any etymology claims unless there are strong reasons to add it.
