Thread by @ZevHandel

We've already seen where the Chinese word meaning 'you' (Mandarin nǐ, Cantonese nei5 ~ lei5) comes from: it's a variant form of the Classical Chinese word now pronounced ěr in Mandarin. But where does the written character 你 come from?

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360448134392868866

This is the second of three unanswered questions from last week’s thread. It’s a circuitous route to the answer: on the way we’ll be discussing looms, balances, Japanese kanji, and 20th-century character simplifications.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360459970513313798

We’ll start with the origin of the character for the Classical Chinese second-person pronoun, 爾, which was pronounced something like neʔ in Old Chinese and is ěr in modern Mandarin.

Early forms of the character suggest it is an image of a loom, a device for weaving cloth. The cross-hatching represents interwoven threads. It was originally a pictograph used to write the Old Chinese word for ‘loom’.

That Old Chinese word for ‘loom’ was a near-homophone of the Old Chinese word for ‘you’. So the pictograph of the loom was used as a rebus to represent the similar-sounding word for ‘you’. This kind of rebus usage was an essential technique in the early development of the script.

By the time we get to the seal-script form recorded in the Han-dynasty dictionary Shuō wén jiě zì 說文解字, the graph is starting to look pretty close to its modern form 爾.

Look at the top part. One early variant of this character was an abbreviation, retaining just the top part and discarding the bottom half. This kind of character abbreviation has been a feature of the writing system for its entire history, especially in informal contexts.

That top part looks something like this: 尒. Slight changes in the handwritten orientation of the top two strokes led to additional variant forms 尓 and 尔.

These handwritten simplifications were all in circulation, and continued to be recorded as non-standard variants of the character 爾 in later dictionaries.

When written forms of the new vernacular form of the pronoun started appearing in the Tang, they were written using this abbreviated form of 爾 coupled with the PERSON radical 亻: 你.

An unofficial, abbreviated character to write a vernacular spoken word.

This raises an interesting question. Was a character form derived from 爾 used to write the vernacular pronoun because of a historically continuous use of the same character to write the diverging words nǐ and ěr?

Or was 尔 simply a conveniently available phonetic component appropriate to the creation of this newly needed character?

I don’t know the answer, and I’m not sure if it’s knowable, given the gap in the textual record prior to the Tang.

But whatever the reason, by the time we get to the late medieval period, we have two distinct words and two distinct characters, both firmly entrenched in the spoken and written languages: 你 writing what would become nǐ, and 爾 writing what would become ěr.

In origin, the two words are the same. And in origin, the two characters are—aside from the added PERSON radical—also the same. But today, those etymological and graphical historical connections are obscured.

Unless you know where to look.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360450910715957252

There’s a bit more to this story, though. A 20th-century coda, if you will.

...

In the 1950s and 1960s, the PRC government decided to officially “simplify” the Chinese-character script in an effort to boost literacy rates.

They understood that this effort would meet with resistance, in part because of the strong association of traditional Chinese characters—essentially unchanged in form over two millennia—with the unique, ancient cultural heritage of China.

So the committee charged with deciding simplified-character forms made a deliberate decision to seek out models with roots in Chinese textual history.

Some simplified forms were plucked from obscurity (like 阴 and 阳 for 陰 and 陽)

others from well-known historical precedents (like 从 for 從)

many from calligraphic tradition (like 马 for 馬)

and still others from handwritten abbreviations (like 个 for 個).

Not coincidentally, a lot of these 20th-century PRC simplifications, like 国 for 國, were already standard in Japan, where their use originated in the variant forms commonly used in Buddhist manuscript texts imported from China.

Anyway, the old abbreviated variant of 爾, our friend 尔, was revived to replace it as an official simplified character.

And in this way, the 1,500-year-old open loop between 你 and 爾was closed, at least in mainland China. These divergent forms, borne of a single ancient graph, were reunited.

And that brings us to the end of our answer to the question we started with …

except that a reader, @oogu, pointed out that we also find the component 尔 in the right side of 称.

What's going on there?

称 is the PRC simplified character for the Mandarin word chēng ‘a scale/balance; to call’, and it's also the standard Japanese kanji (with onyomi pronunciation shō).

Since we've been talking pronouns, we can pause here to enjoy a bit of serendipity: this character appears in the Chinese and Japanese words for 'second person': 二人称.

But that's no more than a delightful coincidence. It doesn't explain what 尔 is doing in 称.

The Mandarin word chēng doesn’t sound anything like nǐ or ěr, so why is there a 尔 there? It’s not a phonetic component indicating approximate pronunciation. And it’s certainly not a semantic component gesturing to a related meaning.

The answer is: this is a simple case of meaningless graphic convergence. The traditional form of the character that writes chēng is 稱. The right side, 爯, is in origin a pictograph showing a hand holding up a scale.

That right side, 爯, was abbreviated to 尔 simply because of the graphic shape. The two characters 爯 and 爾 bear a superficial visual similarity, even though they depict very different material objects—a scale and a loom—and don’t look much alike in their pre-Han incarnations.

Their simplified forms have merged to 尔, creating the appearance of a historical relationship between 称 (chēng ‘a scale/balance’) and 你 (nǐ ‘you’) where none actually exists.

Such are the vicissitudes of history: Divergence causes what was once the same to become unrecognizably different, while convergence makes the formerly distinct deceptively similar.

And that’s where we’ll leave things for now. There is still one unanswered question remaining for us to tackle next time. I'm looking forward to it! /end

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1360458828353966080

Thread continues here:

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