In Mandarin Chinese, 您 (Pinyin: nín 🔊) is a polite or formal second-person pronoun that could be used in both singular and plural, like German Sie or Russian Вы. So 您好 (nín hǎo) is a polite way to say “hello”.
As you can see, 您 is a combination of 你 “you” (informal singular) with 心, “heart”. I see a genial, smiling face of a bearded man, whom I may wish to address politely — out of respect — but who wouldn’t mind my 你好 either.
More photos related to beads, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.
In Mandarin Chinese, 们 (Pinyin: men 🔊) is a suffix used to form plurals for pronouns and some animate nouns. This character is a phono-semantic compound of semantic 亻, a radical form of 人 “person”, and phonetic 门 (mén 🔊).
们 is a simplified form of the traditional character 們 (as 门, you may recall, is a simplified form of 門).
Important compounds of 们 include
More photos related to hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.
So what have we learned so far about Chinese pronouns? Like in many Indo-European languages, there are gender-specific third person pronouns in written Chinese: 他 “he” and 她 “she”. Unlike many Indo-European languages, spoken Chinese does not differentiate between “him” and “her”: both are pronounced the same (Pinyin: tā 🔊).
But that’s not all. Also unlike many Indo-European languages, written Chinese has gender-specific second person pronouns: 你 “you” (singular informal masculine) and 妳 “you” (singular informal feminine). In spoken Mandarin, there is no difference between 你 and 妳 (nǐ 🔊).
As you should have guessed by now, 妳 is derived from 你 by replacing 亻 with 女. According to Wiktionary,
This character is mostly used in traditional Chinese when referring to a female person. Although 妳 is rarely used in simplified Chinese, it may still be found in some contexts.
More photos related to hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.
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”.
More photos related to hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.
