Thread by @ZevHandel

Let’s talk about the commonly-occurring Chinese character 得. You probably haven’t thought too much about it because it’s so familiar. But there is something odd about it. And if you dig into the oddity a bit, you discover that it’s got an unusual and intriguing history.

In Standard Written Chinese, 得 represents three different Mandarin words: the verb dé ‘to obtain’, the colloquial auxiliary verb děi ‘must’, and the grammatical particle de that introduces a potential complement.

In Cantonese writing, the character writes the words dak1 ‘to obtain’ and dak1 ‘to be okay’, among others. All of these Mandarin and Cantonese words are historically related.

They all originate in an ancient Chinese word meaning ‘to obtain’ and pronounced something like [tək], more or less the same as the modern Cantonese pronunciation.

So what’s odd about the character? Well, it’s this thing. I mean, what the heck is that?

Most Chinese characters are made up of chunks of strokes that are seen over and over again in different characters.

Those stroke chunks are usually functional: they indicate something about the pronunciation or the meaning of the word that is written by the character.

To take a simple example, consider the character 照 which writes Mandarin zhào ‘to shine’. It’s composed of two functional parts:

The first part is the four dots at the bottom ⺣, which is a flattened form of 火 ‘fire’. These four dots of fire are also found in characters like 煮 (zhǔ ‘to boil’), 焦 (jiāo ‘burned’) and 煎 (jiān ‘to fry’).

The second part, the pronunciation component, is 昭 (zhāo ‘bright’). It in turn is composed of 日 (rì ‘sun’) and the sound component 召 (zhào ‘to convene’).
And 召 breaks down into 刀 (dāo ‘knife’, the sound component) and 口 (kǒu ‘mouth’, the meaning-category component).

All of these parts, singly or composed, occur over and over again in different Chinese characters.

And that’s where 得 is weird. Try to break it down into parts. It seems to work okay at first, and then it goes horribly wrong.

The left side is 彳. In origin it’s a left-half abbreviation of a drawing of crossroads. It’s used in characters writing words whose meanings are related to roads, travel, or movement.

Other examples of character containing 彳 are 徑/径 (jìng ‘path’), 徘徊 (páihuái ‘to walk to and fro’), and 從 (cóng ‘to follow’) (though not in the simplified character 从).

The right side of 得 is 㝵, which seems at first glance to be made up of two parts in a rather ordinary way. But what are they and what functions do they serve?

At the top of 㝵 is 日 (rì ‘sun’). Or …

is it?

Maybe it’s 曰 (yuē ‘to say’)?

It’s hard to tell which, since neither one seems related by either sound or meaning to the word dé ‘to obtain’. That alone should give us pause.

But it’s the bottom part of 㝵 that should really get your Spidey-senses tingling. Have you ever seen that four-stroke combination anywhere before?

It looks almost like 寸 (cùn ‘inch’). It also looks almost like 于 (yú ‘to’). But it’s not the same as either one.

In fact, that thing at the lower right of 得 is so unusual that it’s not found in any other Chinese character. It’s unique to 得. I can't even find it in Unicode.

So what is the origin of this character? How did it end up with this bizarre structure that seems to defy analysis?

Let’s figure it out!

To find the answer, we have to go way, way back in time to look at earlier forms of the character and trace its evolution. We’ll start with forms that are more than 2,000 years old and work backwards from there.

Let’s start with the seal script form of 得 from the 3rd century bce, as recorded in the famous Han-dynasty character dictionary Shuō wén jiě zì 說文解字, composed in 100 ce.

When we look at the bottom right part of the seal-script character we find, surprisingly, something completely normal: a hand.

The ancient pictogram of a bare hand, shown here, has evolved into two modern forms: 手 and 又.

If an additional short stroke is present to indicate that the hand is grasping something, then we end up with the modern form 寸.

You’re familiar with this hand grasping something from such characters as 奪/夺 (duǒ ‘to seize’) and 射 (shè ‘to shoot an arrow’). Sometimes it's on the bottom, sometimes it's on the right.

So it seems that the lower right part of 得 was originally a picture of a hand holding something. That fits the meaning of dé ‘to obtain’ pretty nicely. But it leaves us with a mystery: Why does the modern form of the graph have one additional stroke, 一, at the top of 寸?

Sorry this is taking so long, but we're getting there! It only gets more interesting from here.

In addition to the mystery of the extra horizontal stroke, we also have to explain the part above it, the one that looks like 日 in the modern form of 得. In the seal-script character it looks really different. It appears to be an older form of 見/见 (jiàn ‘to see’).

But that doesn’t make much sense, because jiàn ‘to see’ doesn’t have an obvious connection to dé in either sound or meaning.

You know what? To solve this ...

... we’re going to have to go farther back in time, back to ancient bronze inscriptions and even all the way back to the earliest extant examples of Chinese writing, the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, which date back to the mid-13th century bce.

When we look at these early character forms that are about 3,000 years old, we discover something really interesting: They often (but not always) lack the left part, the crossroads, and consist of a cowrie shell — a valuable item — above a grasping hand.

The cowrie shell pictogram has evolved into the modern character 貝/贝 bèi, meaning both shellfish and money. It’s in a lot of characters that write words with meanings related to value, like 貴/贵 (guì ‘noble, expensive’) and 貸/贷 (dài ‘to lend, borrow’). Many others too!

We now have enough information to piece together the twists and turns in the history of the character 得! To represent the word dé ‘to obtain’, an ancient Chinese scribe created a pictogram: a hand grasping something valuable.

Over time an additional element, the crossroads 彳, was sometimes appended. It's said that this reflects the notion of obtaining something valuable along the road. Whether that explanation is true or not, eventually, it became part of the standard form of the character.

Then—and now we are finally getting to the heart of the mystery that this thread started with—the right side evolved in an unusual way.

The upper part, the cowrie shell, lost its legs and was reduced to 目. (I know that looks like an eye, but the resemblance is just superficial.) The lower part developed as expected into 寸. The result, 𥃷, is what the character for dé *should* look like today.

But then something really crazy happened.

The bottom-most horizontal stroke of 目 detached, floated down, and attached to the top of 寸. That left the top part looking like 日. In other words, 𥃷 became 㝵. The top part of 㝵 isn’t a sun! It’s a cowrie shell that lost its legs and then lost its lowest horizontal stroke.

Had the pathways of historical accident operated a bit differently, the ancient character for dé ‘to obtain’ could easily have ended up in the modern script as 𧴫: a hand and a cowrie shell.

Instead, a bit of graphic confusion and the addition of a supplementary semantic component have given us the superficially baffling form 得.

That’s the end of the story.

Well, almost. Because this sequence of events I've described tells us the what and the how, but not the why.

The weird thing about this story, the thing I don’t know how to explain, is *why* this character became graphically distorted.

To be sure, graphic distortion isn’t rare in the history of Chinese writing. But it’s usually something that happens when the parts are no longer recognizable to a scribe. If their shape and meaning aren’t salient, they are less likely to be preserved accurately when copied.

A character I showed earlier is a pretty good example of this process: 射 (shè ‘to shoot an arrow’). Early forms clearly show that the left side is a drawing of a bow and arrow, and the right side is our familiar “hand grasping something” 寸.

If you are familiar with ancient character forms, you can see that the left side resembles the old form of 弓 (“bow”) with a left-pointing 矢 ("arrow") readied for firing.

But even if you’re not familiar with ancient character forms, you can just look at this bronze form and say “Oh, obviously a hand firing an arrow from a bow.”

That left-side component—a bow with an arrow loaded in it—was not in itself a character that wrote a word, and was not a component that occurred in other characters. Without that reinforcement from repetitive use in other graphs of the script, it easily became obscure.

And that's why it was ultimately mistaken for, and graphically and merged in form with, the more familiar component 身 (shēn 'body').

But the component parts of the ancient form of 得 are common in early as well as late Chinese characters, unlike the bow-and-arrow in 射.

A cowrie shell, a grasping hand.

These are high-frequency, recurring components found throughout the Chinese-character script. And they are transparently related to the meaning of the word dé that is written by the character. Why did they undergo graphic distortion?

If anyone has a theory as to how this happened, please share!

And now this thread has, mercifully, finally come to an end.