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by microcolonel 2080 days ago
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.
2 comments
dheera 2080 days ago
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.)

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microcolonel 2080 days ago
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.
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bgee 2080 days ago
>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

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