Yin and yang Da Cidian") enter "yangyin" *陽陰. While "yang" and "yin" can occur together in context, "yangyin" is not synonymous with "yinyang". The linguistic term "irreversible binomial" refers to a collocation of two words A-B that cannot be idiomatically reversed as B-A, for example, English "cat and mouse" (not *"mouse and cat") and "friend or foe" (not *"foe or friend"). Similarly, the usual pattern among Chinese binomial compounds is for positive A and negative B, where the A word is dominant or privileged over B, for example, "tiandi" 天地 "heaven and earth" and "nannü" 男女 "men and women". "Yinyang" meaning "dark and
Taijitu has its nature. Instead of usual "Taiji" translations "Supreme Ultimate" or "Supreme Pole", Adler uses "Supreme Polarity" (see Robinet 1990) because Zhu Xi describes it as the alternating principle of "yin" and "yang", and ... insists that "taiji" is not a thing (hence "Supreme Pole" will not do). Thus, for both Zhou and Zhu, "taiji" is the "yin-yang" principle of bipolarity, which is the most fundamental ordering principle, the cosmic "first principle." "Wuji" as "non-polar" follows from this. Since the 12th century, there has been a vigorous discussion in Chinese philosophy regarding the ultimate origin of Zhou Dunyi's diagram. Zhu