Edit: Lol the comments are kinda funny on this one, RHETORICAL QUESTION GUYS YOU CAN STOP TYPING.
Hey guys, recently I saw a post asking the question in the title, and I prepared a long response, but perhaps due to some unhelpful comments, that post was deleted. I think some of you may find this helpful so here's the block of text!
Important to note, most kanji are not compound ideographs (会意), combining characters for their meanings. But are rather phono-semantic compounds (形声). Which have one component for their meaning, and another component for their sound.
For 妊, the 女 is the meaning component, indicating that it's about women, while 壬 (not 王) indicates the sound. You might notice that both 妊 and 任 both have the same sound component, and are both pronounced "nin". This is how 90% of kanji were created in ancient China.
With 妃 its story is more complicated. Of course the forms and pronunciations of characters can change over thousands of years. As far as I can tell, while the modern form appears to have the component 己, apparently the original form of that was 卩. And this was in fact a compound ideograph, with 卩 representing a kneeling man. This kanji shows a women and man kneeling side by side, which was then reinterpreted to mean Queen. However as the form of this character changed, the text 説文解字 wrongfully interpreted this as a phono-semantic compound, thinking that 己 represented its sound.
https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A6%83 https://zi.tools/zi/%E5%A6%8A
Kanji has a long history with a lot of twists and turns, but 90% are phono-semantic compounds which are easy to get the hang of. Don't feel discouraged!
(Bonus fun fact, 壬 in it's own is pronounced "jin", but in mandarin, all 妊, 任, and 壬 are pronounced "ren". You can find a similar correspondence with 人 which is read both "nin" and "jin" in Japanese, and pronounced"ren" in mandarin.)
by SilverCat0009
12 comments
because the king impregnates a women ig imagine being a little left wing that never got in touch with a thing called jokes and u get offended over anything haha i guess reddit is left wing yo left wings downvote me so im the most downvoted coment in this channel
Isn’t it 壬 (ren) vs 王 (wang)? Wang is king, Ren is …the only meaning I know is the one used in eg Party A, Party B, Party C… (it’s the 9th one) 😅😅
Ren normally turns into jin/nin in Japanese.
~~It isn’t 王 though. It’s 壬, which essentially means “ninth calendar sign”. A typical human woman’s pregnancy lasts for nine months, so there you go.~~
~~Also fun fact: No matter what English mnemonic methods like RTK will tell you, not all components of a kanji contribute to meaning. Some do, but a vast majority simply do not. This means that the mnemonic I gave you in the previous paragraph is not meant to be a proper historical or linguistic etymology.~~
It’s not king.
That’s where RTK finds its use I guess.
The right side has nothing to do with king
too many people here have read only the title lol (to be honest you should have not phrased it as a question, even though you didn’t include a ?)
Can anyone donate me your wanikani subscription if you have already finished?
Or token id so i can use it on smouldering durtles
rhetorical questions don’t work on language learning subs because the hordes of well-actuallys activate like sleeper agents when they see something vaguely shaped like a question and they become physically incapable of reading further
Are you familiar with The Tudors?
Strictly speaking, a 妃 is not a queen (as westerners tend to get confused with), but a female spouse of a male member of the royal family.
On the other hand a queen regnant is a 女王 (and never a 妃).
In fact you can address a female monarch as simply 王. The same applies to imperial titles like 皇帝 and 天皇. Female empresses regnant of Japan ([女性天皇](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7%E5%A4%A9%E7%9A%87)) are still officially entitled as 天皇.
To be more specific:
* 女帝/女皇 = empress regnant
* 皇后 = empress consort
* 女王 = queen regnant
* 王后/王妃 = queen consort
* 王女/内親王 = (born-to-be) princess
* 王子妃/親王妃 = princess by marriage
Very interesting, I have heard about this but somehow everyone seems to know it but nobody teaches it.
Is there somewhere I can read more about this in depth? Like which ones roughly where this applies?
Like 女 and 安, is there some kind of hidden rule can help me guess the reading of 定 or does this only apply to left-right compounds? (I don’t want an explanation for these ones in particular, I’m just looking for the most in-depth resource there can be about this, with examples, counter-examples, etc)
Man if I didn’t get married to a Japanese guy and just started hating life I’d be telling everyone about Chinese entomology
hanziyuan fucking sucks now
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