In Mandarin Chinese, 你 (Pinyin: nǐ 🔊) means “you” (singular informal, like German du, Russian ты or Spanish tú) or “your”. This is probably the first Chinese pronoun everybody learns without even realising: the greeting 你好 (nǐ hǎo 🔊), 你 + 好, literally “you good?”, except this is not a question. (Nor, for that matter, is “how do you do”.)
According to Wiktionary, this character is a phono-semantic compound of semantic 亻, a radical form of 人 “person”, and phonetic 尔, which is a simplified form of 爾. Lawrence J. Howell in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters gives a different explanation:
尓 (= 爾) (adhere) + 人 person → person with close and ongoing relations with oneself → you. Compare 儂. Note the variant form 儞.
Curiously (for us), in written Chinese there is a difference between feminine and masculine second-person pronouns:
In traditional Chinese, 你 may be used to specifically refer to a male person, while 妳 can be used for a female person. In simplified Chinese, only 你 is standard.
A combination of 你 “you” and 我 “I”, 你我 (nǐwǒ), rather unsurprisingly, means “you and I”.
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Hello.
ReplyDeleteI started to learn Chinese Hanzi history, and i was struck by how many phonetic loans happened in the Chinese language, and i wanted to know what was the original Hanzi for "I, me".
爾 was a cloth on a loom, right?
舊 was a owl perched on a nest and became "ancient/dated".
我 was a broadax used as a war weapon.
吾 was "5" and a 口 (mouth), i heard somewhere that it used to be a name.
汝 was a woman sitting by a river.
儞 was a person near a cloth loom.
I heard that 汝 was more common than 爾 and that 爾 was used more to mean "your" rather than "you" that was 汝.
Also it seems that 儞 was rare in usage in Classic Chinese, but it is the proper traditional form of 你.
There was also an ancient variant of 妳, that was 嬭, that meant "milk, mother" , it seems that 妳 was re-elaborated in the early 20th century as "you" when referring to women.
Hello,
Deletethanks for your comment — I wish I knew the answer to your question! To me it seems highly unlikely that a symbol for a weapon were the original symbol for a first-person pronoun.
Indeed.
DeleteOn this page it shows the evolution of the hanzi 我.
http://qiyuan.chaziwang.com/etymology-9609.html
This puzzles me, it also seems that 豫 and 餘 seem to have original meanings as a person's name but became pronoun.
Also in Japanese 我 and 吾 were used in similar ways, read as /wa/ and /ware/
豫 餘 were equivalent to 我 even if read as /jo/ in Japanese.
I'd go with 人 being used in old Chinese as pronoun but that's just a theory.
I'm confused why traditional Chinese doesn't use 爾 and 儞 instead of 你.