This page is an English summary of a reposted Chinese article from itrewub/jh-notes. The original article is stored here for study and is licensed under CC0 1.0.

Tags: Society, Clan, Feminism

Summary

This article traces the concept of “love” through comparisons among the Latin Bible, the King James Version, and the Chinese Union Version.

Its central concern is that the modern East Asian concept of “love” is not simply a native concept inherited unchanged from classical East Asian culture. Instead, part of its modern meaning comes through religious and translation history.

The article reads key phrases word by word, especially from the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13, and argues that translation choices often shift authority and meaning. For example, the Latin expression related to ambition is interpreted as “love has no ambition”, while the King James Version renders it in the direction of “doth not behave itself unseemly”. The author sees this as a meaningful shift from ecclesiastical interpretation toward an English royal-cultural context.

Several major claims stand out:

• Love is not merely emotional warmth.
• Love involves patience, especially the patience of enduring pain.
• Love does not envy, boast, inflate itself, or seek its own benefit.
• Love is not easily provoked and does not imagine evil.
• Love rejoices in truth, not illusion.
• Love involves bearing and enduring, not just vague “tolerance”.

The article’s most interesting thread is that translation can hide or reshape moral structure. A phrase that seems familiar in Chinese or English may carry different force in Latin, and the moral meaning of “love” can become softer, more sentimental, or more culturally convenient through translation.

I keep this repost as reading material because it shows how a concept can be transformed through language, religion, and cultural transmission.