Talk:時間

ZH Etymology

@RcAlex36, thank you for adding the clarification. If you can add anything further to explain sense development and dates of appearance, that would be great. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 15:39, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Eirikr: I'm afraid that searching for the text where a compound was first attested isn't an easy task (or perhaps I'm just not aware of the proper way to do it). I'm just quite sure that the modern sense of "time" was borrowed from Japanese. Obviously, there were other words for the sense "time" in Chinese prior to the introduction of 時間, for example 時候／时候 (shíhou). RcAlex36 (talk) 15:48, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@RcAlex36, ya, no argument about the specific sense of "time" as in opposition to "space". My initial concern was that only listing this as {{wasei kango}} incorrectly indicates that the term didn't exist at all in Chinese prior to the Japanese coinage, whereas the Japanese use of this compound to mean "time" was a repurposing of an existing compound, using the term to translate various western works and applying a new meaning in the process. Same as for Japanese 社会 (shakai), 自由 (jiyū), 化学 (kagaku), etc. I'm curious to know more about the Chinese term prior to the Japanese reforging, but as you note, it's a lot harder to find Chinese etymologies for compounds than it is for single characters.  :) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:28, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Eirikr: 化學／化学 (huàxué, “chemistry”) was actually coined in Chinese first during the Qing dynasty. Anyway, Chinese Wikipedia calls terms that existed in ancient Chinese texts but got repurposed in Japanese before being reborrowed into Chinese 半和製漢語, but I guess as long as we indicate which senses of a compound are borrowed from Japanese, the label {{wasei kango}} is good enough. RcAlex36 (talk) 16:42, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Re: kagaku, apologies, the JA repurposing may have been 科学 instead. I like the idea of indicating which senses were borrowed. Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:48, 19 March 2020 (UTC)