[Buddha-l] Question about Chinese orthography

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 14:23 -0600, Michael LaTorra wrote:

> I ask because I see in John Blofeld's "Zen Teachings of Huang Po" that the
> word "BEING" is in all capitals in the middle of a sentence.

second only to text messaging and the failure to put george w bush in
prison, i'd say that the invention of upper case letters was the biggest
mistake in all of western civilization. real languages don't use upper
case letters, because, truth be told, no one needs them. all they do is
give some words a false air of importance. for example in english, the
first person pronoun is written in upper case letters, as a result of
which people who speak english are incurable egomaniacs. in german nouns
are written in upper case letters, because germans think persons, places
and things are more important than actions or qualifiers. 

in indic languages and in east asian languages, on the other hand, there
is no distinction between letters, as a result of which "BEING" can only
be regarded as a misleading translation. please throw blofeld's
translation of huang po into the nearest forest fire.

-- 
richard hayes
department of philosophy
university of new mexico