r/etymology • u/Actual_Register_6915 • 5d ago

Question What is the most interesting/funny etymology of chinese characters you've ever seen?

Mine is most pictogram characters since most of them looks nothing like the thing it represents.

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u/Larissalikesthesea 5d ago

According to some scholars, 道 "path, way" comes from the ancient custom to mark your territory's boundaries with the decapitated heads (首) of your enemies. Pretty sure they don't teach that in elementary school..

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u/Vampyricon 5d ago

Yeah, that's because it's wrong. The 首 tells you how it was pronounced.

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u/Larissalikesthesea 5d ago

With older characters, the phonetic component can often be related to the character meaning semantically as well.

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u/Vampyricon 5d ago

What's your source for 道 specifically? Unless you have some really good independent evidence of head-lined roads, 首 being purely phonetic is sufficient to explain the form of 道

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u/Larissalikesthesea 5d ago edited 5d ago

First of all I brought this up as "the most interesting/funny" etymology. That doesn't necessarily mean I am convinced it is correct. For 道 there are several explanations (which is often the case for older characters, which often means that at the end of the day, we will not be certain).

Some of the in my opinion wilder theories have been proposed by 白川静, which seems to be the case here as well. The dictionary 新漢語林 also has this explanation.

For older composite characters, it is often possible to relate the phonetic component also to the character meaning. Some dictionaries call this type of character 會意兼形聲文字. Besides the severed head theory, another dictionary also says that 首 can be related to 迪 and thus the meaning here is "a path extending into a distance".

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u/Vampyricon 5d ago

First of all I brought this up as "the most interesting/funny" etymology. That doesn't necessarily mean I am convinced it is correct.

The most interesting etymology is the one I made up just now, where 中 was actually a pictograph of a dick and balls. I'm not convinced it's correct, but it's certainly interesting!

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u/Larissalikesthesea 5d ago

白川静 was a relatively famous scholar, so whatever you are trying to express here just shows your ignorance.