Thread by @ZevHandel

I like thinking about familiar things that turn out to have surprising back stories. The modern Chinese second-person singular pronoun 你 (Mandarin nǐ, Cantonese nei5 or lei5) is one of those things. The history of the spoken word and the written character contains surprises.

When I started learning Chinese, the Mandarin words nǐ ‘you’ and nǐhǎo ‘hello’ were in the first lesson’s vocabulary list, and你 was one of the first Chinese characters that I learned to recognize and write.

These words and this character are also among the first that native Mandarin speakers learn as small children.

Third-person pronouns (words meaning ‘she’, ‘he’, and ‘it’) vary quite a bit across the Chinese languages. Generally speaking, Mandarin dialects have a word like tā, Yue dialects like Cantonese have a word like keoi5, Southern Min dialects have a word like i, and so on.

You could dive into a pretty deep rabbit hole exploring the origins of all these third-person pronouns and explaining why they are so different from Chinese language to Chinese language.

But the other two basic pronouns are pretty consistent. Nearly all Chinese languages have a first-person pronoun (‘I, me’) that is cognate to Mandarin wǒ 我 and have a second-person pronoun that is cognate to Mandarin nǐ 你.

So, all in all, nǐ is a pretty ordinary word. We wouldn’t expect to learn anything surprising about it.

But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be tweeting, would I? So let’s see what this little pronoun is hiding.

So where does nǐ come from? I mentioned before that 我 and 你 are nearly ubiquitous in modern Chinese languages. But their histories are not parallel.

In Classical Chinese (aka Literary Chinese, wényánwén 文言文), we find the pronoun 我; it runs all the way back through 3,000 years of written history.

In contrast, 你 doesn’t really occur in the written record prior to the Tang. The second-person pronouns of Classical Chinese are ěr 爾 and rǔ 汝.

Well, here’s the surprising thing:

Nǐ and ěr are the same word.

I don’t mean that they are synonyms. I mean they are actually THE. SAME. WORD.

They share a single origin.

To understand how this can be, we need to consider ancient pronunciations. In Old Chinese, the spoken language of the first millennium BCE, the second-person pronoun 爾 was pronounced something like neʔ.

(That last phonetic symbol, the question-mark looking thing, is the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol representing the sound called “glottal stop”. It’s the consonant sound that occurs between the two syllables of the English exclamation “uh-oh”.

If you say “uh-oh” and stop right in the middle, you’ll feel the closure of your vocal cords -- preventing you from breathing -- that articulates this consonant.

It is this consonantal ending of Old Chinese that engendered the Rising Tone of Middle Chinese and, ultimately, the third-tone of Mandarin ěr.

But the history of tonal development is not the subject of today’s thread, so let’s move on.)

The thing about pronouns is, they have a tendency to get shorter. I don’t just mean in Chinese, I mean in any language. It’s a natural phenomenon.

Why? By their very nature, pronouns refer to things that have already been, implicitly or explicitly, brought into the conversation. They communicate boring old information, not exciting new information.

So they tend to be unstressed and de-emphasized, in order to shift focus on to other, more exciting parts of the utterance. This results in phonological reduction: the shedding of consonants and/or the shortening of vowels.

You can observe this process in action in contemporary spoken American English. In casual speech, “you” is pronounced “yuh” [jə]. “Him” and “them” both end up as “uhm” [əm].

(That’s why a spoken “I see uhm” could mean either “I see him” or “I see them”. We write the former as "I see 'im" and the latter as "I see 'em", but they are pronounced the same.)

That short vowel sound in the reduced forms of “you” and “him” is called schwa, and it’s represented by the symbol [ə], a turned "e", in phonetic notation.

And guess what? In similar fashion, the Old Chinese word for ‘you’, neʔ, became phonologically reduced in just the same way. It turned into nəʔ. See that schwa symbol in there?

By the time we get to the Tang dynasty, this reduced form of ‘you’ was becoming more common, and it eventually completely replaced the full form in spoken northern Chinese. And then it became caught up in the regular sequence of sound changes by which Middle Chinese syllables …

… like lə and nə changed into Mandarin li and ni. And thus Old Chinese neʔ, written 爾, turned into modern Mandarin nǐ, written 你.

Cool story, right?

Except …

... okay, you’ve got questions. I don’t blame you! Something doesn’t add up.

Lots of Chinese words changed pronunciations over the last two-thousand plus years. Take 我, which was ŋâiʔ in Old Chinese and has become wǒ in Mandarin and ngo5 (or o5) in Cantonese. But it is still written with the same 我 in Standard Written Chinese and Written Cantonese.

So why didn’t the written form of ‘you’ stay the same, even as its pronunciation was reduced from neʔ to nəʔ, and then shifted in Mandarin to nǐ and in Cantonese to nei5 ~ lei5? Why don't we write nǐ with the character 爾?

And if the Old Chinese word written by 爾, neʔ, changed into nǐ, then where the heck does the pronunciation ěr come from?

And … and … where did the character 你 come from?

Now that we’re thinking about the character, you might be noticing for the first time how weird it is. Can you think of any other characters that have 尓 on the right side? What is 尓?

I’m excited to explore this further, but look how long this thread is already. I think we’re going to have to wait until next week to answer these questions!

/end (for now)

Thread continues here:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1361570751854354434

And then continues here:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1362273313683165191

And finally ends here:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1363031718668558342