Yeah, and 娶 qu3, to take a wife, was once written 取 qu3, which originally meant to capture; its structure of ear plus hand is said to derive from an ancient practice of cutting off the ear of a captive. Now, what should we read from this into the modern colloquial verb for ‘to marry’? That marriage is a violent or misogynist act? 
[quote=“Chris”]
It’s like unearthing the Buddhist meaning in 緣分 (“yuan2 fen4”, “karmic bond”)[/quote]
To me it looks like pacman and medusa. A good philologist would look for stuff like the humidity the second this was first written. He’d at least be good at speculation. Sounds like a good one hasn’t yet been born.
This guy, 許進雄 Xu3 Jin4-xiong4 (who in English publishes as James Chin-hsiung Hsu), teaches and writes generally acceptable material, mixed with his own loony, unsupported interpretations of graphs, without distinguishing between the two. He is happy to find story-like hui4yi4 explanations in characters which even to my poorly trained eye obviously have a phonetic-semantic structure instead. That is, he makes up fairytales (worthy of Peng’s cartooned Fun with Chinese Characters series) about graphs without looking deeper to see whether there might not instead be a phonetic role for one of the components. An example: for 去 qù ‘go’, which is generally thought by scholars to graphically depict a food container (as do合盒盍蓋) with cover, he came up with, out of the blue, the notion that it depicts a man squatting over a toilet and that from “go to the toilet” it was extended to “go” in general. (Yes, the OB looks rather like a man astride a box.) But never mind that it plays the role of a vessel lid in 盍 ‘gài’, “lid”; never mind that the meaning in the oracle bones was ‘go’ and that there was a different graph consistently used for ‘defecate’; he comes up with this idea out of the blue, presents it as fact, and shows no interest in evidence to the contrary. All other scholars think his idea is ridiculous, and that he’d do well to examine the evidence behind the scholarly consensus to the contrary, but he simply shows no interest in doing so. He just tells his students his idiosyncratic interpretation as if it were fact, and they swallow it.
He likes to look at the OB or bronze form of a graph, then take the modern meanings of the graph, and use them to tell a story about it, without even bothering to look to see whether there is evidence that that particular meaning is a recent phonetic loan. A lot like the hao3 “Have wife 女 plus child 子 is 好 good” bullshit which ignores the fact that 好 didn’t mean ‘good’ until long, long after the graph was created.
I’d come up with more and better examples except that I can’t seem to find his books in my apt. right now. (Gee, maybe I used them to line the cat’s litter box?) Suffice it to say that he completely lacks the skepticism and self-examination needed to be a competent scholar. He fails to adequately cite sources, and does not clearly distinguish between widely accepted scholarly conclusions and his own, often hare-brained speculations; and he never gives you the other scholars’ opinions when they disagree with him. Serious etymologists tend to scoff when his name is mentioned. The dissertations of his students are dismissed as garbage by serious academics I know. One book which, in its introduction, introduces one by one the world’s paleographers and has to show polite academic restraint, writes: 惜近年文章並不多見, 學術活動力不強. 對若千文字的理解和"文武丁之謎"的一批甲骨斷代看法與一般學界亦不同, 研究成果仍待公論. His publications have been few, his views idiosyncratic… you get the idea.
He clearly doesn’t care whether other scholars agree, and is not open to reexamining his own ideas. As a result, each time you get an assertion from him, you have no way of knowing whether it’s part of the 95% good stuff or the 5% spurious crap, and so the assertion is unreliable and therefore worthless. The entire lecture and his entire books become a waste of time. (Imagine a math teacher who has students memorize multiplication tables in which every 10th to 20th product is incorrect, or a Psych prof who taught that the cerebellum was an endocrine gland and Freud was a black woman. Would you hire such a teacher? Would other teachers think well of him?)
His sophomore students have no way of sorting the chaff from the wheat. A responsible teacher and writer will tell you when something is her or his own theory or hypothesis, and the evidence for and against it. This is especially important in an area such as jiaguology (the study of oracle bones), but Hsu fails utterly at this, presenting his own flight-of-fancy notions as if they were fact. A top American jiagu-ologist, in an email to me, wrote that Hsu’s stuff was “idiosyncratic”. Academic courtesy dictates that I not name names – but if you know your jiagu-ology, you might be able put 2+2 together.
A responsible teacher will encourage you to read the opinions of other scholars. Hsu discourages this for fear his students will discover people don’t agree with him. While I was sitting in his class, I clearly remember him saying “don’t bother asking other scholars about my theories; every scholar has his own theories – they’re just different”. That was about the same time I decided to bail out… Having your own theories is not a sin, but his are NEVER well supported by evidence or argument, and NEVER EVER EVER defended against alternative and more widely accepted interpretations, which he fails to even mention, for buddha’s sake. Readers (mostly his own students, who are generally naïve 20-year-olds) are thus misled into thinking that these are the correct and undisputed interpretations, which really does a disservice to them.
To be fair, he is not a bad fellow (although perhaps a bit socially inept), and he has made one contribution to paleography, his studies of the shapes of the pits on the back of oracle bones in a well-known Canadian collection, for use as a supplementary reference in dating the bones. Although an original contribution, it was not exactly revolutionary, since other dating criteria (graphic forms, diviner names, etc.) are still generally superior. It might have been his work with that collection which got him enough prestige to be hired by Taida to teach paleography – I’m not sure – but I really don’t think he’s qualified for the position. He once commented to me that he did not have a strong background in paleography but had been asked to teach the class, or something vaguely to that effect. I took his class on Chinese Paleography at NTU – and quit in disgust after a few weeks.
He knows just enough about oracle bones, bronze script etc. to be able to pass for knowledgeable in the eyes of the naïve, and has written a short series of books, in English and Chinese on the topic. The English books were published by a friend of his in Hong Kong. He told me over lunch once that he had them privately printed because he stole gobs of pictures and diagrams from other sources without permission so he could only have them printed underground. I find this doubtful, since local Taiwanese publishers are unlikely to question such things, but I can’t figure out his motivation here… Local publishing standards are not so high as to render the “we won’t publish this because your content is crap” explanation plausible either.
Suffice it to say that when I mentioned to a group of paleographers over lunch one day a couple weeks ago that I had taken his class, they asked what I thought of it. I just rolled my eyes, slapped my forehead, and they all laughed. No explanation was needed.
Anyway, rant over.
Good rant, DB.
I remember a Chinese bloke in Munich who told me that the graph for hao is in fact woman and man (instead of woman and child) and that this explains the meaning “to love”. I would be interested in hearing your opinion about that.
MOD’s note: Answer is split off in THIS thread.
While I don’t know anything about this person, I wouldn’t necessary discredit him so easily. How much do you really know about epistemology? If you can’t say a whole lot, then start reading. Everyone produces knowledge. 
Here are some words from Granet:
[quote]… The Chinese … endeavoured to realize a traditional ideal, which they defined with increasing strictness.
They are attached to this so passionately that they themselves represent it to be the finest heritage of their race. Several thousands of years before the Christian era, their ancestors (they did not doubt) were initiated by sages into that discipline of life which was their strength. The pure civilization of the earliest ages was the source of a perfect cohesion, and the greatest China dates from the most ancient times. Its unity is broken or is restored according to whether an order of civilization, in principle unchangeable, shines resplendent or more faint.
These systematic views have the value of dogma and correspond to an active belief. They have been the inspiration at the heart of all the attempts at historic synthesis; over long centuries they exercised a decisive influence on the presentation, the transmission and the restoration of documents. We do not possess a single one that can be considered first hand and untampered with. Historians, arehæologists, exegetes, remain impregnated with traditional piety, even when they pose simply as learned men, and even when a “fault-finding” spirit seems to animate them. They determine the facts or the dates, establish texts, lop off interpolations, classify works, not with objective detachment, but in the hope of rendering more acute and purer, in themselves and in their readers, the consciousness of an ideal that history cannot explain, for it precedes history.
Our inspiration will be drawn from a quite different source.
Formerly, Western historians told the history of China in the Chinese way (or something very near it) without even calling attention to its dogmatic character. Today they are endeavouring to disentangle the true in the traditions from the false. They make use of the works of indigenous criticism. They often forget to bring out the first principles, however, and they appear generally hardly aware of the insufficiencies of a purely literary exegesis. In spite of a critical attitude, they seldom make up their minds to admit that it is impossible to grasp the facts.
In order that the data in a document may be of use, is it sufficient merely to have dated it? When we have decided, for example, on the date and month of the Chinese documents relating to the ancient forms of land-tenure, what reality have we got hold of, if we refrain from noting that, according to the documents, the portion of land assigned to one cultivator is five or six times as small as the field adjudged in our day as necessary to nourish a single man in the most fertile and best cultivated countries? The literary history of the rituals is of great interest, but is it possible to write it if one has not taken care to observe: (i) That amongst the objects mentioned in the rituals there are hardly any that excavations have discovered; (ii) That amongst the objects discovered by excavations there are very few about which the rituals give any information?
Possible fields for excavation are scarcely touched. Chinese archæology is inspired by a bookish spirit. It is necessary at the beginning to utter a warning that the documents at our disposal bear a Utopian character. It remains to be seen whether, such as they are, they are without value.
It is not possible to discover from them the least detail of historical facts, nor is it possible to describe with any exactness the material aspects of Chinese civilization. We are ignorant equally of the details of the wars and political intrigues, the administrative customs, the economic practices, the manner of dress, etc. To make up for this lack we possess an abundance of precious testimony as to the various sentimental or theoretical attitudes which were adopted in different milieus in China on the subjects of costume, wealth, the administrative art, politics and war. We are specially wellinformed about the attitude which orthodoxy supported in each case. But the Chinese do not like to lose anything of the past, even when they take care to present an ideal reconstruction; they have allowed a mass of information to survive which contradicts the orthodox theories. [/quote]
While I don’t know anything about this person, I wouldn’t necessary discredit him so easily. How much do you really know about epistemology? [/quote]
Gary, it wasn’t a class on epistemology; it was a class on paleography. 
In paleography, evidence and strong logic are more important than smoking weed and theorizing out of one’s ass. 
(I’m talking about him, not you of course.)
Evidence is no guarantee of proof. Even if the evidence shows something to be 100%. How do you know you have all the evidence?
And logic. Ah logic. Since when did paleographists or any scientists stop pulling stuff out of their ass?
And the precise field supposedly being discussed in the original question was…semantics! Yes, we have a not-yet-mentioned winner. The science of what things mean at any given time, preferably now. (I’m no scholar, you see.) 
Semiotics has some type of answer for that.
I’m a translator, not a fighter!
If you rearrange the letters, semiotics yields semi-stoic. That’s as close to an answer as you’re going to get out of me. 