Korean Confucius Confusion

[stonelee]

The more annoyed you act, the more amusing it is and the more you'll encourage people to continue to make remarks to get you annoyed. It's called trolling, and is a well known phenomenon on Internet forums. The easiest way to stop it, is to ignore it.

:wink:Thank you for your reply,imron~~

Of course I agree with the easiest way you say, but i still like to say something for their replys. (But the words what i say will be as short as i can, i don't like to waste my time in their meaningless replys.)

Actualy,i didn't feel any annoyed when i saw their replys.....i also amusing them when i reply them. As you say, this phenomenon is popular on Internet. What they say are always make laughs and i always enjoying it.

[stonelee]

That is rather amusing. I always like to annoy people by saying Confucius wasn't Chinese at all. His biography in the Shiji 史記 says he was from Lu 魯, not "China".

For Ah-Bin, :mrgreen:I read it again and clearly understand what you said ~~

I need to improve my spead reading in English..., and thank you for your "annoy"~

[zozzen]

Re: Korean Confucius Confusion

I would never say that Confucius is not Chinese, but I wonder what he would have answered if you'd asked him where he was born.

I don't totally feel bad for calling Confucius "korean". It only shows that they're descendants of the culture of Central Plains (中原) as we are, and as a descendant why not they can't make a claim on this? After all, both the terms Korean or Chinese didn't exist 2500 years ago when Confucius was born. We're just competing to be a stronger descendant to take the crown.

The term Chinese is really a complicated concept. Bo Yang's 中國人史綱 said that Korea believed for long time that the orthodoxy of "Central Plains culture" had been shifted to Korea when China was conquered by Manchurian at the demise of Ming Dynasty. The reason they did it was that they're culturally "Chinese" in their korean names. I don't see the reason to feel offended on this.

What would people think if news like this happened: Italian protesters take to the street and gather at the British Embassy of Rome to object the idea of calling ABC as 'English Alphabets'. Protesters said, "It's an act of pirate to steal our cultural asset! It's Latin Alphabets, Not English!"

The appeal angers thousands of Greek who claims Latin Alphabets as a 'corrupted form of Greek alphabets', even though some historians insist Greek alphabets is another form of Phoenician alphabets. The PM of United Kingdoms of Phoenicia declines to comment but say they only exist in the Bible.

Edited July 7, 2009 at 05:01 PM by zozzen

[Lu]

"It's an act of pirate to steal our cultural asset! It's Latin Alphabets, Not English!"

That's not piracy, it's stupidity. That alphabet is indeed called the Latin alphabet. I've never heard a serious English-speaker claim it as their invention.

[Hofmann]

Off topic for a sec:

The Whatever alphabet refers to the alphabet used in the Whatever script, regardless of its origin. Similarly, the Japanese writing system is the writing system used to write Japanese, regardless of its almost exclusively Chinese origins. In other words, those Italians are being stupid.

[Lu]

Afaik there is no such thing as a Japanese alphabet. The wikipedia article you link to calls the kana 'syllabaries', the characters are, well, characters, not letters. Even the Japanese themselves call them Chinese, by the way (汉字).

I've often heard Chinese people call the ABC 'English letters', but that is not the right term. You can write English words (Dutch words, Italian words), but you write them in the Latin alphabet.

[Hofmann]

I didn't mean to imply that Japanese uses an alphabet.

[zozzen]

So, what's wrong if we say that British ancestors invent "English alphabets"? and could it offend anyone if UK took "English Alphabets" to be listed in "UN cultural heritage" ? Here i mean "English alphabets" in which they have their own pronunciation on every alphabet and the way to make spelling. Any attempt to make a list like this may be seen as superfluous and laughable, but it's too far to take it as stealing others' culture.

Criticisms against some korea culture movements in recent years seem to suggest the opposite. What's more different in the case is that it's not "Italy vs UK" , but more like "Europe vs UK". China is even bigger than Europe. It's the homeland of Central Plain civilization which has been well absorbed in korea, vietnam and japan. There's no reason they can't say what they've lived for thousand years as their culture.

Put this logic forward, Africans would have the right to claim to be the origin of all cultures in the world. After all, we're all descendants of Africa.

I don't mean to suggest any dissident's view on this issue, but considering this: Qin(秦) was once 西戎 (Western Barbarians); the blood lineage of Simon Lee (李世民 ) has been in doubt for many years. Not to mention Yunnan, Guangdong and even Hong Kong which was land for savages. We're just lucky, as a unified China, to take the Central Plain as their territory.