Today in my talk, I mentioned how languages that use Chinese characters, or ideograms, have an advantage over English and similar languages. When we read a church-related term in English, it's often hard to grasp its meaning without a dictionary or an explanation. You'd usually need to know the original language—be it Greek, Latin, or something else—and its meaning there to truly understand it.
However, in languages that use ideograms, you can often visually understand a word's meaning just by looking at it. I find it fascinating how different our experience can be with languages and meanings...
Below, I've included a few examples from Japanese, since I don't speak Chinese.
[ To be fair, when church or Christian terms arrived in Asia, there was likely an effort to record them in a way that conveyed their meaning. In modern Japanese, however, things might be different. These days, it's popular to write foreign words using katakana.
Katakana is one of the three main Japanese writing systems, primarily used for transcribing foreign words and names, as well as for emphasis. Unlike kanji (which are based on Chinese characters and often carry inherent meaning), katakana characters represent sounds, similar to letters in the English alphabet.
So, when words are written in katakana, they're recorded phonetically, based on how they sound. This means their meaning isn't visually obvious, which probably adds a certain mystique and "coolness" to such words in the eyes of Japanese speakers. ]
Words structure examples:
信仰 - shin-kou - (religious) faith. 信 - (general) faith, trust. 仰 - look up, face-up, seek...
福音 fuku-in - Gospel (good tidings). 福 - blessing, fortune 音 - sound
背教 hai-kyou - apostasy. 背 - back, behind, [turn your back on..] 教 - teach(ing), doctrine
神権 shin-ken - priesthood. 神 - God 権 - authority, power, rights
神権 時代 shin-ken-ji-dai - dispensation. 神権 - priesthood 時代- period, era, epoch
聖典 sei-ten - scripture(s). 聖 - holy, saint 典 - code, law, rule
悔い改め kui-aratame - repentance. 悔 - regret, repent 改 - reform, mend, change
預言者 yo-gen-sha - prophet. 預 - leave with, entrust to, deposit 言 - say 者 - person
使徒 shi-to - apostle. 使 - use, send on a mission, messenger 徒 - follower, person
戒め - imashime - commandment. Literally: caution; admonition; warning; lesson
誘惑 - yuuwaku - temptation. 誘 - entice, seduce 惑 - delusion, perplexity
相応しい - fusawashii - worthy. 相 - inter-, mutual, each other 応 - answer, reply, accept, corresponds to
Kanji structure examples (keys):
祈り - inori - prayer
贖 - aganai - atonement, redemption. shell (used to be a money alternative) + sell
