Talk:Chinese word for "crisis"

message: As a (self-proclaimed) linguist, I think it is fair to say that:
1. The word 危机 weiji/kiki was NOT coined to mean 'danger & opportunity'. It was coined to mean 'dangerous juncture'. I suspect it was coined by the Japanese to translate 'crisis'. (I might add that this statement is rather off the mark: "The controversy is mostly due to differing interpretations of how much optimism should be associated with the character 機." The problem is the meaning and etymology of the word 危机, not the amount of "optimism" associated with the character.)
2. Somebody (not necessarily an English speaker, quite possibly a Chinese or Japanese) noticed that 危机 could be analysed into 'danger' 危险 and 'opportunity' 机会. This was no doubt a very attractive analysis for motivational pep talks.
3. The new interpretation spread into English, and is now also common both in Japanese and Chinese (I can speak with authority for the Chinese, because my native-speaking Chinese boss used this analysis just the other day in a talk with business partners).
It is kind of ridiculous to call this a 'controversy'. The facts are clear enough. The analysis is erroneous. That is the end of the story. The interpretation of 危机 as being a combination of 'danger' and 'opportunity' is a kind of folk etymology. 
But that does not mean that this is not a good motivational example. It is a novel way of analysing the word that beautifully highlights a fundamental truth -- a time of crisis is also a time of opportunity.
That is how the article should be written; not as a "controversy", but as the reinterpretation of a word's etymology to make a particular point.
202.175.171.243 05:04, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The more fundamental problem with the article is that it doesn't properly explain the issue at all.--Jack Upland 01:46, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't know Chinese, but, having followed the links in the article, I think the point is this.  The root meaning is that, in a crisis, the danger has the opportunity (chance) to happen.  It does not mean that a crisis is an opportunity (in the positive, up-beat sense) for the person experiencing it. --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) 11:00, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Kind of like the word risk, which is "down-beat" in English but doesn't have to be. And I agree with the above point that being a folk etyology doesn't make something totally "false". Otherwise, one is confusing the word with the thing. So an honest motivational speaker might say something like, "If I invented a language, the word for "crisis" would reflect this unsupported folk etymology." Just so people aren't misinformed about the facts even as they digest the platitudes. --Lenoxus 18:00, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: To call this a "controversy" is incorrect

message: Is it worth mentioning that this false notion has been used in The Simpsons, referred to by Homer as a 'crisitunity'?
:Sounds appropriate. Done. --Arcadian 22:12, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like its since been removed from the article. An "In popular culture" section should take care of it. Morganfitzp (talk) 16:37, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Simpsons

message: I've zapped this:
:The Chinese word weiji (危機 translated as "crisis") is one of the few Chinese wordsOthers include Tao, Feng Shui, pinyin, and hoisin. to enter the English lexicon directly as a borrowed term, or loanword. 
It's not a loanword. I've never heard or seen weiji used in English. It's not listed in any online English dictionary. jnestorius(talk) 12:49, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Loanword 

message: Kofi Annan repeated this trope in a press conference in Nairobi, 15 February 2008 ~17:30 UTC+3. (KTN broadcast). Just noting this, the article probably has enough examples; but this is another very notable person using it. Robert Ullmann (talk) 14:46, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: A "notable usage" section seems like a good idea. Morganfitzp (talk) 16:39, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kofi Annan 

message: People have brought up moves before, but it looks like nothing has been acted on.  I think the article should be moved to Chinese word for "crisis".  Someone above raised the good point that Chinese has other words for crisis, but this is the one that's notable in the English-speaking community (since this is the one that the common pop-culture rhetorical device refers to) and the only one likely to be searched for on en-wiki.  There can be redirects to this from other titles such as Weiji and Chinese word "weiji". Politizer talk/contribs 20:45, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move 

message: All of the linguists and politicians cited in this article are Westerners. The article could really benefit from native Chinese speakers' perspectives. Morganfitzp (talk) 16:10, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: #A native speaker's thought and digging. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 21:50, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Chinese perspectives?

message: In the section Public mistranslation, I marked the following statements with the Cite quote template:
wēi …roughly translates to mean: "danger, dangerous; endanger, jeopardize; perilous; precipitous, precarious; high; fear, afraid"…
these can form words such as "machine, mechanical; airplane; suitable occasion; crucial point; pivot; incipient moment; opportune, opportunity; chance; key link; secret; cunning"
noting in my edit comments that if the lists are not directly quoted from another source, discrete items should be surrounded by double quotes, following convention in the rest of the article.
Unfortunately, comment space prohibited mention of an important point. Both lists include meanings that do not appear in the sources cited (e.g., "jeopardize"; "key link"). I checked all reachable online sources. —Shelley V. Adams 13:16, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lists of meanings for ''wēi'' and ''jī'' 

message: Over a decade after this article's creation, we have amassed significant examples of the "Chinese word for 'crisis'" from political, linguistic, pop culture and globalist perspectives to make this article into something far more comprehensive and less didactic than what exists at the moment. I am up for the task, am looking for native Chinese speaking collaborators. Any takers? Morganfitzp (talk) 16:48, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Feel free to add more significant examples. But don't be obssessed with it, it's not a good idea to convince or motivate people with it, it's indeed a mistranslation after all. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 21:50, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Big overhaul

message: The current Chinese Wikipedia article for "crisis" is unsourced, but nonetheless interesting to this discussion, especially when run through Google Translate. It's unsourced:
The crisis ( English: Crisis ) is a moment of danger and opportunity . It is a moment for testing decision-making and problem- solving ability. It is a turning point in life, group and social development . It is a matter of life and death, interest transfer, and like a fork . There is a saying: "Crisis is a turning point."
Not sure what to do with this, but it interesting. Morganfitzp (talk) 17:38, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Read the section #A native speaker's thought and digging I wrote. The current version of the Chinese Wikipedia article for "crisis" is poorly written, I'm editing it. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 21:50, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: On Chinese Wikipedia

message: Wiktionary actually translates 機 as "7. opportunity, chance, crucial point". Either Wiktionary is completely misleading or even flat out wrong to do so, or the alleged urban legend is not a legend at all, but essentially correct (you could only dispute if it's better to use the translation "opportunity" or "crucial point"). Yes, 機 has many other meanings too – but they are not relevant in context. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:59, 18 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: "機 in 危機 is opportunity" should be considered incorrect, otherwise crisis = danger + confidential (crisis/scandals are confidential and should be concealed) will be correct, too. Read the following section I wrote, #A native speaker's thought and digging. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 21:50, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wiktionary translation 

message: Hi, I'm a native Chinese speaker and I'm the guy who looked up the word in the Xinhua Zidian and added the reference in the article. I'd like to say something here, which might be good for future editing of the article.
Even some of the native speakers can't see the nuance:
The nuance between the 機 in 危機 and "opportunity" is hard to detect even by native Chinese speakers. Here in #If the Chinese use it... an IP user said he "was just listening to the BBC World Service, where a high-ranking member of the Chinese Foreign Ministry! just told me: 'In Chinese, 'crisis' is made of two characters: danger and opportunity.'"; I've recently read an answer on Quora , written by a Chinese PhD student at University of Cambridge who is well known in China because of his high upvoted, pro Chinese govt answers on Quora, the first sentence is: "In the Chinese language, every crisis has an opportunity hidden in it. This is reflected in the Chinese word: 危機. An opportunity (機) always comes after a crisis (危)." According to the version prior to this edit, Shoucheng Zhang, a Chinese-American physician at Stanford University also used this word.
But that high-ranking Foreign Ministry member, the PhD student at Cambridge (self-claimed to be a "coding peasant" therefore seems to be a Computer Science major) and the physician at Stanford are not linguists or sinologist, sometimes they could be prone to making linguist mistakes. Once I've talked with a Swiss sinologist long time ago, she knew the difference of several dialects of Chinese language pretty well, and better than me, I was impressed.
However, some native speakers can still kind of feel the subtle difference there. I see in previous discussion section there are some Chinese dudes also considering it to be a mistranslation. When I first heard this "crisis=opportunity" in Chinese thing from a French friend, I just felt it's bizarre, but was not quite sure if it's wrong.
When I saw it again here on Wikipedia, I looked it up in the dictionary.
Xinhua Zidian:
According to the best-selling Chinese dictionary, the character 機 (jī) means:
*Original Meaning 1. "a point where things happen or change", examples: 危機 (wēijī), ...
**Derivative Meaning 1.1. "an event that has a confidential nature", examples: ...
**Derivative Meaning 1.2. "chance (opportunity), good timing", examples: ...
*Original Meaning 2...
Some may say: so what? "weiji/crisis" refers to the original meaning 1, "opportunity" refers to the derivative meaning 1.2, 1.2 belongs to 1, they are kind of the same, right?
I'd say: not right. Why? Please see the following comparison.
Comparison of two use cases
Politians and motivational speakers want to motivate people, so they say: "look, don't be upset during a crisis, ancient Chinese wisdom tells us, crisis = danger + opportunity"! (making people think that Original Meaning 1 = Derivative Meaning 1.2) OK, this is less controversial because they say it for seemingly good purpose.
But, imagine a government or a company is facing a crisis, a scandal which they are trying to conceal, and they could say: "look Mr journalist, don't publish this news article, ancient Chinese wisdom tells us: crisis = danger + confidential, and this incident is indeed confidential and cannot be publicly known!" (making people think that Original Meaning 1 = Derivative Meaning 1.1)
Oh it's bad. The "ancient Chinese wisdom" is just a convenient tool that can be freely twisted to justify whatever point you want to make.
--Tomchen1989 (talk) 21:25, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A native speaker's thought and digging 

message: I agree that the encyclopedic value of this article is difficult to see.
While it is clear that 危機 cannot be simply decomposed into its components 危 for danger (less controversial) and 機 for occasion or opportunity, a link exists, mainly idiomatically. A nice and complete discussion is available on stackexchange. 
The Chengyu 錯失良機 is one example, where the component stands for the (missed, good) opportunity. 
Japanese use the exact same characters 危機 to express crisis ("kiki"). In personal discussions that I could have with native speakers, they did not see a problem with the interpretation of "danger"+"occasion". But it is also acknowledged that kanji are ambiguous and subject to (multiple) interpretations, just like their chinese originals. The meaning of 機 in the sense of opportunity is likely to be very old, and certainly this meaning is older than that of "machine".
In any case the chinese language (and writing) has a longer history than English, and it is difficult to imagine how it has involved for 3000 years. I would not exclude that some of the evolutions in neighbouring countries have found its way back into chinese. A nice example is how Yamato-damashii#Later_history Yamato-damashii became Wakon over centuries of exchanges of linguistic ping-pong between China and Japan.
In summary, I think the article as it stands today is a hypothesis or opinion, rather than secured knowledge backed by objective sources. It only points to all sources where the statement "crisis = danger+opportunity" was used, until back to 1938, and simply states that those all were wrong.
--DirkHoffmann (talk) 23:55, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that some (zh/ja) native speakers who are not linguists may agree '"機" in "危機" = "opportunity"'. But I'd say "'"機" in "危機" = "opportunity"' is mistranslation" is "secured knowledge" if you ask linguists and sinologists. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 11:57, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

text: Also, in English, "occasion" is not perfectly equivalent to "opportunity". It lies somewhere between "opportunity" and "event" (and Wikipedia article "occasion" redirects to "event" rather than "opportunity"). "機" in "危機" means "point" / "change point" which could also roughly be interpreted as "event". So you see, people who do not agree '"機" in "危機" = "opportunity"' may somewhat agree '"機" in "危機" = "occasion"'. --Tomchen1989 (talk) 11:57, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Have a wider look 

message: what is written below is far more enlightening than the Article so i propose the authors of what's below switch Talk with the Article! What's more, it sounds like "crisis" is an inappropriate single word translation too, recommend changing it to "precarious" or somesuch — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.209.19.85 (talk) 13:14, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled