Claim CG101:

The Chinese glyph for ship is made up of pictographs for "vessel," "eight," and "mouth," indicating the eight passengers on Noah's ark.

Source:

Kang, C. H. and Ethel R. Nelson, 1979. The Discovery of Genesis, St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House.
van Arnhem, Cees, 2002. The Genesis site: Chinese characters. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CW_Arnhem/chinchar/chinchar5.html

Response:

  1. The Chinese character for boat (chuan 2) consists of the boat radical on the left and a phonetic element on the right. The phonetic element has two parts. The upper part is a primitive ideograph for "divide," though it looks the same as the character for "eight." The lower part is the pictograph for "mouth." However, these two elements have only phonetic significance (Wright 1996; Wright n.d.).

  2. The "vessel" on the left side of the glyph is a pictograph of a dugout canoe, nothing like an ark.

  3. According to the Bible, Noah's ark carried very many more than eight mouths.

  4. No flood myths from China include an ark with eight passengers.

Links:

Wright, Mike. n.d. Do Chinese characters tell us something about Genesis? http://www.raccoonbend.com/languages/chinchar/chinchar.html

References:

  1. Wright, Mike. n.d. (see above)
  2. Wright, Mike. 1996. Re: Chinese characters as pornography. Usenet posting, Message-ID: <31C87C35.FF3@redshift.com>, http://www.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=31C87C35.FF3%40redshift.com
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created 2001-2-18, modified 2004-9-23