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A comment on Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997). Parent comment

Re:Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997) by solidsnack9000 on Friday July 05, 2024 @09:46PM (#40887622)
This is not even getting to that; but that is actually pretty simple, to be fair.

The negation is: 非常道

非 -- fei, this has been a negator for a very long time in Chinese

常 -- chang, this means something like common, usual, normal, or nominal (I suspect that translating this as "eternal" is a creative move on the part of some westerner)

道 -- dao, the way again

Nowadays, 非常 as a compound is used to mean "extraordinary" ("not normal", "exceptional"); but it is not hard to see how it might be taken to negate 道 here.

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Re:Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997) by canjobear on Saturday July 06, 2024 @03:29AM (#40888763)
Interestingly the 常 was originally 恒, meaning “constant,” in the oldest manuscripts. It got changed to 常 because it was taboo to write any character appearing in the given name of an Enperor, and Emperor Wen of Han had the given name 恒.
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