From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 12:14:48 EDT
On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 09:11 AM, Eric Rasmussen wrote:
> Richard Cook and John Jenkins did a good job on the proposal [I'm
> assuming your role was to provide the font]. I'm sure they do know
> that my criticism of the Wilhelm/Baynes translations of the names is
> fair. I am hardly the first to do so. Wilhelm/Baynes is by far the
> most widely-circulated translation, and presumably that is why they
> used it.
Yup. That's exactly it.
> Fine. But I still think it was a mistake to use translations for the
> names, because they perpetuate the dubious neo-Confucian assumption
> that the names were meant to embody a core meaning for each hexagram.
It's a reasonable position, but so is the alternative. Basically, we
had set a precedent by giving English names to the radicals (which
itself was a rather problematic thing to do). The Yi itself, of
course, gives them "names" of a sort, and we could conceivably have
transcribed those using pinyin (except that, with my unreasoning
prejudice against modern Mandarin, I would have balked at that,
particularly because that would have saddled one key hexagram with the
impossible name JING or even JING3). Anyway, our goal was to use
whatever is most common in sinology, not what is most accurate, and, as
Ken says, it's water under the bridge now. And about number sixty-four
in the list of Bad Unicode Character Names.
==========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://www.tejat.net/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 08 2003 - 13:15:10 EDT