[microcolonel]

I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed.

As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversion of 田 to 黑 but at least they are related.

[bgee]

玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade".

[0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89

[microcolonel]

Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王.

Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.

[dheera]

Unfortunately, vocabulary in languages are defined, not derived.

Why isn't "business" a measure of how busy you are?

Why isn't "waterboarding" analogous to "snowboarding" and "sandboarding"?

(As an engineer I hate these peculiarities and I'm all for fixing them but the majority of the world tends to want to stick to the not-necessarily-logical definitions.)

[microcolonel]

Sure, I'm not saying everything has to make sense, but buddy here was claiming that 国 had cleaner etymology than 國, and to me it seems like one of these is indirect, and the other is very direct.

[bgee]

>Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉?

I think we have done exactly that[0], it's just not part of the 1986 proposal in PRC.

[0]: https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9B%AF