More on Chinese heritage
I would like to add to what Mr. Liem Sian Tie wrote in The Jakarta Post of Sept. 13, 2001 on Chinese heritage.
Mandarin is a not a "misnomer" for Chinese language but a "widely accepted misnomer". As to the origin of "Mandarin", it is said to have originated from the Portuguese word mandar meaning "to govern" and another version has it that the Mandarin is a corrupted version of Man-Daren meaning Manchu high official. Yet both of them point to a language used by high-ranking officials.
The China/Chinese word itself is also a misnomer because the Chinese, culturally, would call themselves Hua-Ren and the language Hua-Yu of the Hua-Xia civilization or also ethnically Han-Ren or Han-Yu for the language.
The word China or Sina or Chinese probably originated from the Chinese word SI meaning silk and then evolved into Sina or something Chinese from Indian Sanskrit.
The present vernacular Chinese was popularized after the May Fourth movement of 1919 or the new cultural movement, although it had been used much earlier in literature along with the classical Chinese or WenYan.
Although vernacular Chinese is a Beijing dialect, it is now the mother tongue of 70 percent of the Han ethnic group, who are the main ethnic group among 56 other ethnic groups in China.
But Mandarin and Chinese are not the only misnomers, the Russians until now still call the Chinese Kithayski. The British in the not so distant past also mistakenly called China or the Chinese as Cathay, after the short-lived Kara-Khitai dynasty (1124 till 1211 or called Western Liao in China) in Northern China, a dynasty vanquished by the Mongolians.
Chinese civilization is of course one of, but not the oldest civilization considering the Banpo or Yang Shao civilization (4500 until 3750 BC).
But Chinese civilization is the only surviving ancient civilization with consistency and continuity. Central to its survival, is its rationality and humanity. Remember that the Terracota soldiers and horses (221-210 BC) were all made to replace both human and animal sacrifices whereas in another part of the world, religious rituals would begin with both human and animal sacrifices.
SIA KA-MOU
Jakarta