The one that always strikes me the most is 緣分, since I believe in this myself and have always struggled to explain it to my non-Chinese friends. The examples given under the 'Usage' section are pretty good (although I wouldn't use the term in certain of the cases mentioned...or rather, it's not a term that would necessarily spring to mind in any prominent way), but the explanation above that is pretty shoddy, and the 'Translations' section underneath doesn't really hit on all the nuances.
I also find it interesting that the modern Chinese logogram for 'she/her', 她 (the radical on the left is the one for 'woman') was created in order to translate foreign works, which all differentiated between s/he. All Chinese literature written before then (so the four great classics) used only one third-person pronoun for men and women, 他 (this logogram nowadays tends to only be used for men, as 'he/him', but the radical on the left is the one for 'human', which speaks to its roots as the only pronoun used for people originally - I had always wondered why men were 'people' but women were 'women', so it was doubly annoying to find out that 她 exists only because the scholars at that time felt necessary to create it in order to translate foreign works! (When personally I think they'd have been fine using 他 for both he and she, which everyone had done for thousands of years before then!))
Or also the system of honourifics. idk, languages say so much about the people who created them. :)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-03-03 04:11 pm (UTC)I also find it interesting that the modern Chinese logogram for 'she/her', 她 (the radical on the left is the one for 'woman') was created in order to translate foreign works, which all differentiated between s/he. All Chinese literature written before then (so the four great classics) used only one third-person pronoun for men and women, 他 (this logogram nowadays tends to only be used for men, as 'he/him', but the radical on the left is the one for 'human', which speaks to its roots as the only pronoun used for people originally - I had always wondered why men were 'people' but women were 'women', so it was doubly annoying to find out that 她 exists only because the scholars at that time felt necessary to create it in order to translate foreign works! (When personally I think they'd have been fine using 他 for both he and she, which everyone had done for thousands of years before then!))
Or also the system of honourifics. idk, languages say so much about the people who created them. :)