No disagreement at all with the overall message: Etymology is best left to the hands of lexicographers and linguists. Folk etymology is often enjoyable as a process, but not necessarily as a product.

You expected a big “but”, right?

There is none, because we are not talking about etymology here; the issue is translation, i.e., the best mapping between 2 lemma in two different languages. There is no reason that a perfect mapping exists in the joint semantic space — in fact there may not be a joint semantic space to begin with. The bottom of the matter is “can JI be translated as Opportunity here in this phrase/word?”

Victor’s point is because WEI JI is just as dangerous in Chinese as in English, there is no reason to translated JI as opportunity, even though JI is used both ways in Chinese (and hence neutral).

My argument is that many of the words/phrases JI appears (in this sense) are positive in meaning, AND the other character/morpheme are often not obviously contributing to the good/bad dimension. So whether or not JI is neutral by etymology, the overall vote from the semantic network seem to favor a positive connotation, which warrants the translation to “opportunity”.

let me check … I didn’t use the word “but” above.

Searching Google for my Matlab+Tobii problem I stumbled at your nice blog. Is it possible that you mail my so I can reply you with my problem. I don’t want to expand on it in your comments ; )

Regards Michiel

I agree with your analysis of the character Ji. I think the meaning of many characters are derived from the meanings of the words include them.

Well, a flying ‘Ji’ (飛機) will take Chung-Hui and me to Boston tomorrow. See you there!

Shiou-yuan