A question for linguists

[Tom Bayley]

I was chatting to a friend the other day when some thing popped into my head. It was about something I might have read on the previous hungkuen forum .

I think it was about the translation of the characters for "wu shu" that although they are often taken to mean "martial art" their components can be read as "halberd" and "line" so it could mean "to hold a line in battle" or "to stand and fight."

I have no linguistic ability of my own so I thought I would ask those that do what they think.

[Daifong]

Is this what you were wondering about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phalanxpursos/Wushu

[Tom Bayley]

Thanks daifong - that's it, although the interpretation I think i remembered was different.

In the magourity of cases the best form of self defence is to avoid violence. Yet this was not the case for military arts. Military arts were used when it was nessisary to stand up to violence.

So the interpretation I remembered was less about self defence and not using weapons and more about training to use force against force when necessary.

As I say I am not a linguist so I am wondering weather the meaning of wu shu is only "self defence" or weather it can also mean "standing and fighting".

I think I have also seen wu shu translated as "battlefield art" wich (for me) has different conertations from "self defence".

[Daifong]

[Tom Bayley]

In the uk we do not have a second amendment or citizen militia. It's you chaps across the pond that go in for that sort of thing.



i practice my kung fu for the joy of practicing it and i teach it so that others can benefit from a yogic practice in the same way that i have.

As far as believing Wikipedia i do not know where that interpretation came from however i do know that there are individuals on this forum with both an understanding of language and of martial arts. I just wonder what people think.

[Itinerant_Phenomenologist]

There is always a certain logic to the construction of words/characters. Sometimes they are extremely obvious like the character for "wood" [木]... when doubled it is the character for "forest" [林]... and when tripled it is the word signifying a particularly dense/luxuriant forest [森] <--that character, when coupled with another, is also meant to emphasize the vastness/limitless nature of something.

The one I like to think of constantly is the word for "righteousness" [義]. It is composed of two parts. The top character is a character for lamb/young goat [羔], and the bottom portion of the character is the character for [我]. Just a cursory consideration will make this seem extremely appropriate as righteous people are typically those associated with individuals who place the helpless/disenfranchised above their own considerations, shouldering their burdens or carrying them through difficult times; much like how the character is structured with the helpless/gentle lamb placed on top of the individual.

With that logic in mind, we go to the issue of the words [武术]:

The last character is a simplified character. The traditional character is [術]. It is seemingly composed of three parts, but the right-most and the left-most actually are a single character serving as a radical. The left-right portions create the character [行] which means "moving"/"traveling", and the middle character [朮] means "method"/"technique". Combined together they simply make the character for "method"/"technique". However it should be noted that the traditional character intentionally incorporated an action radical which indicates that the original intention for the character was to be an action type of methodology/technique/skill.

The first character, [武] is, as wikipedia indicated, a combination of the two characters for "halberd"/"polearm" and "detain"/"stop". However, I think it is notable that the halberd portion of the character is both more prominent AND positioned ABOVE the "detain"/"stop" character. If my consideration of the character for "righteousness" bears any weight, and I will be the first to willingly admit error if explained as such, then it would seem that this prominence and placement should be given equal consideration as the individual characters themselves that compose the word.

Coupled with the traditional character [術], it would seem that a good way to understand the phrase [武術] would be "an active method/skill [術] of using weapons to stopping conflict [武]". Under this reading and reasoning, it would be correct to say that the phrase refers to resorting to an aggressive force as a way to end conflict.

As always, I'm perfectly willing to let someone tell me I'm wrong... nicely please. I'm all sorts of delicate fluffiness.

[Tom Bayley]

Thank you Itinerant Phenomenologist for the time and care you put in to replying to my question.