insults tone of voice etc alright fine we can calm down before things get out of hand but let me first bring to light some examples of confrontational language on your part may i remind that you entered the argument quite bluntly with the statement in capital letters You Are Not Correct you want to talk about sounding smug perhaps keep an eye on yourself as well then prior to my last rejoinder you concluded with your own sense of superiority declaring to have put the matter to rest fine perhaps you have not been writing in english as much lately but may i remind you that this can be perceived as a provocation as well this is especially since you had not yet cited your most recent source re chinese cosmogony but instead went on about pictograms it is sincerely wonderful to know that you were a student of prof jerry norman but perhaps you were just a regular speaking writing chinese language student of his and not a student of the more specific field of chinese linguistics his writings on the latter should leave no doubt in any reader s mind that pictographic or ideographic are gross mischaracterizations of the chinese writing system this fundamental concept may only get passing mention in a regular language class if at all but i can not easily imagine an english fluent student of chinese linguistics ever losing sight of that concept whether or not they are currently in the habit of writing in english day to day anymore so if you were indeed a linguistics student of prof norman then i can only suggest that you apparently lost sight of a cornerstone concept within the field and perhaps need to re read his and other s writings on i try to say this with all due respect you also argued earlier about how even the english word raw has other tangentially related meanings such as unrefined bare etc but the same can not be said about cooked the only other meaning for cooked in english might be the slang usage his goose is cooked as in he is doomed by translating as cooked in english this precludes ascribing to the original any other meaning than the culinary one so while i can agree that the most recent source you cited might begin to shed some light on the possible merit of your position it remains contingent on the fact that the original chinese and can have these double meanings to which i might say fine so maybe the Qing era classification might have alluded to the pure culinary senses of the words as well but they obviously also intended to convey the meanings familiar assimilated vs unfamiliar unassimilated and my arguement has been that this was primarily what they meant to convey even if the other essential meanings of the original characters were also meant to be alluded to however in the english translations of raw and cooked only raw has the potential to allude to the quasi suitable secondary meanings thus again it is the english translations which are problematic therefore an english only reader of the article will come across the terms raw and cooked and thus think that the chinese were just obstinately ethnocentric overlords willing to just classify non han tribes in the same vein as things and objects that they were or were not this chauvinistic is not the issue and i would agree that they were indeed quite chauvinistically ethnocentric but by simply translating the terms as raw and cooked one loses the more nuanced shall we say ethnocentrism of the chinese literati from that period because an english reader of the article will assume that only the culinary senses of the word were intended