That's one. Now show how that particular Chinese ideogram is so amazingly similar to things in other non contingent cultures? As far as I can see, you want me to be amazed that the Chinese ideogram for "large boat" features a boat, and I just don't find that that amazing.
"船 - "Large boat"
This is actually the Chinese word for a simple "boat" or "ship" (
chuán), not some particularly large variant. The correct term and hanzi for "large boat" is 舸 (
gě).
Japanese, notorious for its homophones, refers to both symbols as
fune, which is possibly where this mistake arose.
CMI attempts to break this character down into its components in order to establish a connection to the great Flood:
- 舟 does, when taken on its own, indeed mean "boat" (zhōu);
- 八 is indeed the number "eight" (bā), if used in isolation;
- 口 means "mouth" or "opening" (kǒu). CMI translates it as "people", to which it only has a very tangential relation, as 口 is the measure word for people.[note 2] The actual character for "person" is 人 rén, another common component that obviously does not appear in this character.
An alternative would be to use the character 舩, which also means "boat/ship/vessel" and is pronounced the same (
chuán, Jpn.
fune), but much less common. Its radicals are:
- 舟 "boat", same as above;
- 八 "eight", same as above;
- 厶 "personal/private", a variant of 私 (sī), which is even more tangential than the connection to "people" above.
The idea behind this setup is to suggest that the character refers to the eight people that were on the Ark:
Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives. However, CMI is making a crucial mistake in disassembling the character completely. What they ignore is the fact that Chinese characters are not made up exclusively of components that provide a meaning, but also of phonetic radicals that are supposed to offer a clue as to how they're pronounced. In both of the cases above, they simply skip this part in order to extract
the meaning they want from it. The first character does not feature 八 and 口 as separate components, but rather as the combination 㕣
yǎn, with the (irrelevant) meaning of "marsh". Likewise, the second one features 公
gōng, "public" as the additional component.
Another point which they ignore completely is that there are specific kanji/hanzi for an ark — 方舟 (
fāngzhōu) in Chinese or the Japanese 箱舟
hakobune which translates roughly as "square-boat", or "box-boat".
[12] Noah's Ark would be ノアの箱舟 —
Noa no Hakobune.
The number eight has significance in Chinese culture (e.g., Eight Immortals, Eight Trigrams of the
I Ching). Finding yet another eight is unsurprising.
Creationists use this claim to bolster the idea that the Chinese, along with all other cultures, are descended from Noah and his family. Creationists fail to realize that of the
two deluge legends from Chinese mythology, one myth involves the flood being averted twice, and the other features a brother, Fuxi, and a sister, Nuwa, survive the flood in a gourd, with all non-divine life perishing. Moreover, the Chinese invented the word "八" 1,800 years ago. Why would the Chinese wait 1,200 years after the Flood to commemorate it in their written language? The claim that Chinese characters commemorate the Noachian Deluge is nonsense.
It may be tempting to argue that the top of 㕣 is actually 几, as that is how it tends to be rendered in Modern Chinese. However, the 几 in the phonetic component 㕣 is actually a 八 in older versions of the character. "
Hanzi of Genesis - RationalWiki
