Vol V: 妇 and 男

Hello everyone, welcome to my passion blog: Origin of Chinese Character. In the fifth episode of this video series, we are going to look into other Chinese Characters clarification: Compound ideographs Now let’s get started. So, what are compound ideographs*, It is basically meaning making model. You take two different or more different ideographic or pictographic and piece them together. Bam! You get a new character with more complex and specific meaning. (draw a 宝 here) Ok, now take a look at today’s character (write out 妇 and 男):

妇 and 男, Which means female or wife, and male or husband accordingly. Notice these meaning are specifically back in ancient Chinese, they may be used slightly differently. Let’s break them apart. For the character 妇, you can see the left part is a figure of lady or girl. The right part is a simplified broom. So in ancient China, females will stay in the house and do cleaning or dishes. Quick peek of oracle bone script. You can see the picture of a kneeling lady using brushes or broom to clean up.

Then, the character nan; it is combination of character 田and 力, The upper part tian means field and farmer land and the lower part is the force. Basically, the working labors who are in the field taking care of the crops are males! The oracle bone script shows the figure of farmland and plow.

So, a brief summary, compound ideography is aiming to combine different ideographic and order them into new characters.

Maybe this content identification of female and males sounds so gender discrimination to you. However, it will trace back to a special economic system in ancient China. Thousands of years ago, gender role is divided clearly. Males are staying outside doing heavy labor work, making money, protect the family; while females are staying inside taking taker of children, cooking, and sewing. This type of economic system called natural economy or small peasant economy, which impact the Chinese culture profoundly.

Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy this video, See you next time.

(a quick correction, I did write the character 宝 incorrectly in the video. However, due to the limited time of media common, I am not able to record new footage to make the correction. Sorry for this mistake)

*some scholar or paper will also call it combined ideographs.

References:

http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=1621

http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=1053