Re:Hong Kong crowd booing China's anthem sparks police probe
by emodendroket on Friday July 30, 2021 @06:33PM
(#28013235)
> One of my political science professors in college claimed that they used to struggle to translate constitutional documents to Chinese, as they didn't even have an agreed upon word for "human rights" until the 1970s or so.
That claim appears to not be true. And since many Western concepts (like all the specialist communist terminology) made their way to Chinese through Japanese words using Chinese characters, if it _were_ true it would seem like it'd imply something about Japan too. Japanese uses a word with the same characters but I couldn't run down a good citation of the first dates all of these appeared besides the ngrams.
Simplified Chinese:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E4%BA%BA%E6%9...
English:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=human+rights&y...
That claim appears to not be true. And since many Western concepts (like all the specialist communist terminology) made their way to Chinese through Japanese words using Chinese characters, if it _were_ true it would seem like it'd imply something about Japan too. Japanese uses a word with the same characters but I couldn't run down a good citation of the first dates all of these appeared besides the ngrams.