Radical Transliteration

“Hack” in English has a rather brutal nature that I associate with maiming. My interpretation of the word lends more credence to its Germanic root haccian, the elegant action of ‘cut[ting] in pieces’. Hacking is a DDoS attack; haccian is finding an outdated package that has a privilege escalation vulnerability.

In my last YC application I spent a while deconstructing this notion (Begriff), in a very Nick Land way that was probably unintelligible. This time I will be more of a good boy. Outside of the world of computing I engage the same epistemic principles in the nebulous realm of critique. While my degree will eventually say Philosophy, my love of wisdom extends beyond the world of Plato and Kant; nowadays I spend most of my time reading literature, history with anthropological historiography, palaeontology, business and pop psychology, and biblical exegesis.

The intellectual exercise I find most enjoyable is philology (literally “love of words”, in the context of historical documents). Being a polyglot allows me to play with meaning in a unique way. My two favourite languages to do this with are English (which I consider a sponge language, as it is so adaptable) and Chinese (ancient and meticulously designed, a language with a seemingly unambiguous symbolic order). My favourite work of Chinese philosophy is the 道德經 (Dao De Jing), which is also the most translated Chinese text (I own 14 of the 450 English translations). It is a rite of passage for any Chinese scholar to attempt their own. Being heavily inspired by Wittgenstein and Lacan (a strange pairing, I know) I decided to attempt a radical transliteration of the text.

To give an example (you can play along at cn.stephenokita.com), here are the first lines of the 經:

道可道, 非常道.
名可名, 非常名.

The translation I last read renders it as (Hoff, but I replaced “way” with “path”):

The path that can be followed is not the eternal path;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

A transliteration would be: The Way that can be expressed is not the constant Way; the name that can be named is not the constant name.

A radical transliteration goes a step further: rather than translating the character, it takes the character apart and translates the radicals it is built from. A word like 道 (dào), meaning path or way (as in 街道 jiē dào, street), breaks down into 辶 (chuò), meaning to move or to walk, and 首 (shǒu), meaning head, chief or first. 名 (míng), meaning name, breaks down into 夕 (xī), meaning evening, dusk or night, and 口 (kǒu), meaning mouth.

So a surface-level radical transliteration (we can go deeper than this) would be:

Movement head can movement head, not enduring movement-head.
Evening-mouth can evening-mouth, not enduring evening-mouth.

I obviously made a script to do this for me (on the same website/repo), but this radical transliteration gives us a different way of looking at Chinese as a language and at meaning as a historical construct. Breaking Chinese into its radical components, we see the pictographic roots and can apply our own phenomenology to them.

From just the radical transliteration a feasible interpretation becomes:

Progress that progresses is not everlasting progress;
The desire of desire is not everlasting desire.

Now, a big fat historicity asterisk: Chinese as a written form had gained external symbolic coherence outside its pictographic shell hundreds of years before 老子 (Lao Zi) penned those 5,000 words, so the first translation is more accurate. My interpretation is most definitely bound up in my own ideology, or maybe just in an effervescent sonic aesthetic; however, by slicing the language into tiny bits we gain the levity to enter completely new meaning spaces.

I am also an engineering (purposely misspelt) or whatever, and my favourite programming philosophy is CUPID.