In Mandarin Chinese, 爱 (Pinyin: ài 🔊) has many meanings but all of them are related to love. It could be a verb “to love” (a person), “to like”, “to be fond of”, “to enjoy” (food, activity), “to treasure”, “to value”, “to care about”, “to respect”, “to be prone”, “to tend”, etc. It could be a noun for “love”, “affection” or “benevolence”. It could be an adjective “beloved” or “affectionate” and could also be used as a honorific for someone else’s daughter.
爱 is a simplified form of the traditional character 愛. If you look carefully at this latter, you’ll notice 心, “heart-mind”, in its middle.
On the origin of the character, Wiktionary says:
Originally 㤅, a phono-semantic compound: phonetic 旡 + semantic 心 (“heart”).
As early as the Qin dynasty, a meaningless component 夊 (“foot”) was added to the bottom of the character, as with some other characters depicting people.
Lawrence J. Howell in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters provides a different explanation:
The relevant seal inscription form combines a variant form of 既 (engorgement) + 心 heart/emotions → be emotionally hindered, in the sense of feeling overladen/dragged down → love.
Weird etymology aside, this is one of the few cases where I definitely prefer the traditional character to the simplified one. I mean, how it is even possible to replace the most important element, 心, with a single horizontal line? OK, with its 13 strokes, 愛 is not the easiest hanzi to write; then again, you probably shouldn’t use this word too often anyway.
According to Wiktionary, 爱 “is not known to exist until the simplification of Chinese characters by the People’s Republic of China in 1956”. The only, I mean only, advantage of 爱 is that it’s marginally more legible on the computer screen, but they didn’t know that in 1950s, did they?
So now, I guess, is the moment you were waiting for all this time. How to say it in Chinese?
or
Remember the difference?
More photos related to love, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.
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